SIP, A Reality Check

06/10/09

By Graham Francis

If you and your company are involved in Voice over IP and Unified Communications then there's no doubt you'll have heard about SIP (the Session Initiation Protocol). You may be (even a little bit) excited about all the things it promises to achieve by enabling multivendor products and services to work together. However, sometimes it's good and even necessary to just stop and look closely at what's actually happening with SIP, who's using it and what lies ahead for this most disruptive of protocols!

So let's start by asking,

What is SIP?

Well, SIP is boring!

Ok, to me...

...it's not boring. However to people who simply want to make phone calls and use IM or their Unified Communications client to 'reduce human latency' (yes, that's a real UC benefit) it's not really something they care about. Who wants to talk about signalling protocols, new SIP methods and the work of the IETF working groups? Not your customers that's for sure - all they want to know is will it work, how much and will it save them money?

Who's using it and Why?

In reality a lot of people are using SIP without really knowing about it as it is replacing a number of existing proprietary protocols in IP handsets, PBXs and of course is starting to displace digital trunks. Yes, I know that it doesn't provide all the features that a 'proprietary' protocol does. SIP can help in cutting PSTN access costs, integrate voice, presence, messaging, and video services for a great Unified Communications solution. Include the possibility of tying all of these services to business process applications; surely that beats the need for some obsolete phone feature that is pointless supporting anymore.

So, how is it developing?

It's the responsibility of the Internet Engineering Task... continued on page two >

 

 

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