Short answer
Direct Routing connects your Microsoft Teams tenant to the phone network through Session Border Controllers (SBCs). With FirstNet, the SBCs are FirstNet-owned and Microsoft-certified, so you need no SBC hardware or separate SBC vendor, and FirstNet manages them end to end.
In detail
What FirstNet Direct Routing offers:
- A carrier-agnostic design, so you can keep an existing carrier or use FirstNet's ICASA-licensed SIP trunk.
- Custom routing, including location-based routing, custom voice routing policies and multi-tenant scenarios.
- Coexistence with an on-premises PBX, analogue lines via ATAs, paging, fax and common area phones.
- TLS 1.2 encrypted signalling and SRTP encrypted media.
- Resilience options from a standard SBC to an HA pair or geographically diverse SBC clusters.
- Numbers ported in, or newly issued from FirstNet's own allocations.
Deployment follows five phases: prepare (tenant readiness, certificates, firewall and NAT), plan (dial plans and routing), provision (tenant and SBC configuration, porting), pilot (end-to-end test calls and pilot users) and production (full cutover and handover to support).
Direct Routing suits organisations with these more complex requirements. Where none apply, Operator Connect is simpler, and the two can run side by side in one tenant.
Source: FirstNet Microsoft Teams Calling service page →
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