It’s true that softswitch is the backbone of any VoIP business due to many reasons. For the starters, it performs basic functions such as routing, billing, reporting and monitoring which are the most essentials for any VoIP business. With growing demand for VoIP services, each function is again strengthened with robust features in order to make them most reliable and secure for VoIP business. More details about that in the following paragraphs. 

Routing is one of the important functions of softswitch responsible to route the VoIP traffic from different channels to the intended destinations. In doing so, termination routes from international routes provider play a very crucial role in terminating the VoIP traffic at desired destinations. These routes could be of cheap, standard, and/or high quality. So, service providers should pay special attention while buying them from international routes provider. It’s always better to go for high quality routes as they assure highest customer satisfaction. These purchased routes can then be configured in the routing function and routing algorithms can be created around them. Thus, routing plays a crucial role in not only terminating the VoIP traffic but also offering high profit margins for service providers.

Billing is another important function in softswitch which keeps a track of customer accounts and their usage for generating precise bills. Typically, a billing function should take into account various factors such as discounts and taxes applicable, special rate cutters, rate plans, dues, etc., in order to generate the right bills. Even a slight deviation would result in serious business loss for service providers and would adversely affect the customer loyalty. So, billing in softswitch is always crucial and needs much focus.

Finally, monitoring and reporting provides the necessary business intelligence required for smooth functioning of VoIP business. Live call monitoring will allow service providers to know the online SIP user status while reporting allows them to generate various types of reports such as user-based report, revenue based report, time-zone based report, etc.
Considering that a softswitch performs all these complex business functions, it can be concluded that softswitch is indeed the backbone of any VoIP business.