Googling SIP will result in almost 30 million hits and include things like structural insulated panels and South Idaho Press, but the majority and certainly the top ten will all be related to Session Initiation Protocol. It has become a hot topic in the discussion of VoIP and in many cases, whether people fully understand it or not, they want it.
How a protocol gained such notoriety is interesting in itself, but it is important to understand why you want to be on the SIP bandwagon. There is still plenty of debate. Telecom-centric purists will argue it doesn’t provide all the elements to deliver the features of a phone system. Internet enthusiasts will argue that it is a protocol that opens up a world of creativity to deliver new solutions. Evangelists and marketers will argue that the elegance is in its simplicity.
If I can think of one thing that is most important, it is the focus on the standardization of a single protocol platform by virtually every vendor in the industry. As protocols go, SIP and its extensions are still pretty new, but it really doesn’t matter. It is designed to be open enough to allow creativity, and there are and will continue to be hundreds of solutions out there. Now you can’t take anything that says SIP on it and get guarantees that it works with anything else that says SIP, but the same could be said about any other voice-related protocols.
Consider this. You can use a SIP enterprise solution to connect IP telephones and media gateways, other SIP media applications, and even connect with your service provider, and everything can work together. This means eliminating all the special interfaces that were once required, as well as specialized hardware elements and non-IP connections.
Take it a step further. If you look at efforts in the next-generation service provider networks, particularly the mobile network known as IP Multimedia Subsystem, they too too utilize SIP. If you call your provider who sells circuit-based PRIs or T1s), they should have a program to offer you the same over IP and it will be based on SIP (or SIP Trunking, which is an extension of it).
SIP doesn’t preclude itself from being used with other protocol methods, and new systems that also support protocols like SOAP/XML have methods where the two work together to create communications solutions that are all IP, all software and provide more capabilities with better economics. How can this be wrong?
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