AudioCodes offers three ways to run Microsoft Teams Direct Routing — an on-premises Mediant appliance, a virtualized or cloud-hosted software SBC, and AudioCodes Live, a fully managed voice-as-a-service option. The right choice depends on your session volumes, in-house telecom expertise, and how much operational visibility you need once it's live — not just which option is cheapest to deploy.
Certification is a compatibility check, not an evaluation.
Microsoft maintains a list of session border controllers (SBCs) certified for Teams Direct Routing, and AudioCodes' Mediant family has been on it for years. That certification tells you the equipment will interoperate with Teams. It doesn't tell you whether an on-premises appliance, a virtualized SBC, or a fully managed service is the right way to run it in your environment.
Most evaluations stop at the certification question and move straight to procurement. That's how organizations end up with a deployment model mismatched to their team's telecom expertise, their session volumes, or their appetite for ongoing operational work — and don't find out until the first outage.
Three deployment models, not one product.
AudioCodes gives you three distinct ways to connect Teams to the public telephone network, and they aren't interchangeable.
| Deployment model | Who manages it | Best fit | Operational overhead |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-premises appliance | Your team | Regulated environments needing data residency and full control | High — firmware, capacity planning, 24/7 monitoring |
| Virtualized SBC (Mediant VE) | Your team | Enterprises with cloud infrastructure and in-house telecom skills | Moderate — same admin burden, more deployment flexibility |
| AudioCodes Live (managed VaaS) | AudioCodes | Teams without dedicated telecom staff, or fast time-to-value needs | Low — but less control over configuration and troubleshooting priority |
The table above isn't a ranking — each model is the right answer for a different environment. What it should do is stop the conversation from starting and ending at “which one is cheapest to license.”
The details that get skipped in a rushed evaluation.
Size by concurrent sessions, not user count. AudioCodes licenses and prices Direct Routing capacity by concurrent call sessions, not by how many Teams users you have. A 5,000-user organization with light calling needs a very different session count than one running a high-volume contact center. Ask your provider for guidance on peak concurrent sessions, not seat totals.
Confirm certification status for your specific model and firmware. Microsoft's certified device list specifies firmware versions, not just hardware models. An AudioCodes appliance running outdated firmware can fall outside certification even if the hardware model is listed — and Microsoft only supports Direct Routing on certified configurations.
Check your Microsoft Phone System licensing separately. Direct Routing requires Teams users to hold a Microsoft Phone System license (bundled in Enterprise E5, or as an add-on to E1/E3), independent of whatever you pay AudioCodes. Confirm this is budgeted before you compare AudioCodes pricing against a calling-plan alternative.
Ask about media bypass support. Where supported, media bypass keeps voice traffic between the SBC and the client instead of routing it through the Microsoft Phone System, reducing hops and improving call quality — worth confirming as part of your technical evaluation, not assuming as standard.
Two ownership models solving the same problem.
Direct Routing and Operator Connect solve the same underlying problem — connecting Teams to the PSTN — through different ownership models. With Direct Routing, you (or your AudioCodes deployment) own the SBC relationship and configuration. With Operator Connect, a certified carrier manages that connection and integrates it directly into the Teams admin center, reducing your configuration burden further.
AudioCodes supports routes to both models, which means the deployment decision and the ownership decision are separate questions. An enterprise that wants Direct Routing's flexibility but not its administrative overhead can lean toward AudioCodes Live; one that wants the lightest possible touch may prefer an Operator Connect carrier relationship instead. Neither is universally correct — it depends on how much of the telephony relationship you want to own directly.
A working framework, not a scorecard to file away.
That last item is the one evaluations most often skip, and it's the one with the highest operational cost when it's missing.
The decision doesn't end at deployment.
An SBC evaluation naturally focuses on getting Direct Routing working. But once it's live, the SBC becomes a real-time, high-throughput component sitting between Teams and your carrier — and it can't be treated as set-and-forget. Certification and licensing decisions are made once; monitoring is a decision you live with every day the deployment runs.
Most AudioCodes-Teams issues that reach a support desk trace back to a small set of causes: certification or firmware mismatches, codec negotiation failures between Teams and the carrier, one-way audio from NAT or media-path problems, or capacity limits being hit during peak periods with no warning. Every one of these is detectable before users notice — if something is watching for it, using the same signaling and media checks that any SIP monitoring strategy needs to catch.
One view across your AudioCodes deployment and everything else.
IR Collaborate provides dedicated dashboards for AudioCodes SBC monitoring alongside a vendor-agnostic view across your broader communications ecosystem — so if your Teams environment also touches Cisco, Avaya, or other platforms, you're not switching between separate management consoles to find the fault.
That means visibility into SBC health status, session capacity against your licensed limits, voice quality metrics, and the connection between your AudioCodes deployment and Microsoft's Direct Routing interface — in one place, in near real time. For a deployment decision that's ultimately about avoiding the moment a certified, correctly sized SBC still delivers a bad call because nobody caught the warning signs, that single view is the point.