said by Davesnothere:So again - in laypersons' terms - Would it be functionally the same to most of us individuals as having a DID and an outbound calling arrangement, and our own device ?
(and then 'INBOUND SIP Trunking' would be equivalent function to just the DID and the device ?)
Well it usually involve multiple nodes (e.g: IP Phones) connecting to end point(s) (IP PBX) themselves connecting to ITSP's.
I guess the definition is loose, an IP Phone connected to your IP Provider sounds more like a branch, or a SIP Line than SIP Trunking to me but anyway.
If you were to design a schema of SIP Trunking used in an office, including all the phones and the PBX(s) and how they connect to their IP Provider, it would somehow look like a Trunk, branches converging to a single trunk.
"INBOUND" Sip Trunking could refer to a carrier that provide DID Numbers to a company IP PBX system, the later distributing incoming calls to phones in the company, for example VoIP.ms providing numbers to a company or a Carrier providing numbers to US and us distributing the calls to our customers.
Here I stole a random Image from Google Images to demonstrate the analogy:
We can call it as gimmicky as we want, the term is quite common and it's at least good to understand what the common consensus in the industry is, even though we not all share the same approval level on the term.