The Power of SIP

This week the ANPI marketing and sales team is attending and exhibiting at ITEXPO in Las Vegas. There will be opportunities for us to speak, learn and discuss the latest in IP communications, including my participation in a discussion of SIP trunking.

SIP trunks are expected to overtake T1s as the most sold form of broadband for businesses in 2015. Additionally, the cost of a SIP trunk has fallen from an average price of $12.50 per concurrent call session (CCS) to $10.00 per CCS. Finally, if vendors implement the SIPConnect 1.1 standard, as many have committed to do, then the issues associated with interoperability testing will be reduced or potentially eliminated.

SIP Trunks are becoming commoditized, and that is not a bad thing. It just means its not as exciting to discuss as it once was.

SIP, on the other hand has a long way to go before its capabilities are fully realized. SIP is similar to HTTP. It is limited to simple negotiation of data streams between endpoints. It is to negotiate a voice connection real-time or to exchange text messages, presence information or other kinds of data including video moving between IP endpoints.

SIP is an enabler of UC functionalities and applications. It also plays a central role in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), protocols which define the architecture of next-generation mobile networks for streaming text, voice and video to mobile subscribers.

There is an ongoing dialogue of the future of SIP versus WebRTC. SIP will continue to be used in network and carrier-based applications for some time to come. WebRTC is an open source platform and suite of APIs to develop a common interface that is browser-based to support communications between any and all end-user devices such as computers, TVs, phones, tablets, etc. WebRTC is meant to democratize and decentralize tools” for content creation and communication.

The future is not a debate as to which of the protocols will survive but how each will be applied. As an industry we are fortunate to have both contributing to the success of IP communications.

David Byrd is chief marketing officer and executive vice president of channel sales for
ANPI ZONE
. He previously spent five years as vice president of marketing and sales for
Broadvox and before that was vice president of channels and alliances for Eftia and Telcordia.