Event to Put Spotlight on SIP Trunking, Security

A question-and-answer session on what topics will be hot at this year's SIPNOC conference.

By Brad Reed
Mon, April 18, 2011

Network World — 2010 was a breakout year for SIP trunking, with customer implementations on the rise and vendor revenue more than doubling by some accounts.

With this in mind you can expect to hear a lot of talk about SIP trunking at the SIP Forum's annual SIP Network Operators Conference (SIPNOC) that's due to be held April 25-27 in Herndon, Va. But Marc Robins, the SIP Forum's managing director, says that SIP trunks won't be the only hot topic as SIP security and even SIP faxing protocols will be popular at SIPNOC as well.

PRIMER: SIP trunking

Here's more from Robins:

Why is SIP trunking such a big topic right now?

The first answer to that question is easy: It's because the infrastructure for SIP trunking is in place now. The bandwidth is there and the pipes that service providers are giving to enterprise customers is extremely good. Packet loss and other issues surrounding QoS have been resolved very well and today you can say that SIP is as or more reliable than the public switched telephone network.

The second answer is that people still need to know a lot about interoperability to make sure SIP performs as it should. There are multiple options that can make it difficult for the players involved to be consistent in how they deploy SIP trunks. The SIP standard is so complex and provides so many different options it's not easy when you look at the standard to know what everybody else is doing. So for instance, if the SIP trunk provider plays by "Option 1" in the standard while the PBX provider plays by "Option 2," the end user will find that both options are technically correct but when it comes time to have a problem-free communications session you're going to have a lot of issues.

How is the SIP Forum working to resolve interoperability issues?

We've put together a task group that will outline some best practices called SIPconnect that will make it easier for people to interoperate. SIPconnect won't make everything happen automatically but instead of the troubleshooting process going on for weeks, we're hoping to get it down to a matter of hours or days. SIPconnect says that if the ISP and IP-PBX were both installed and were programmed the way SIPconnect lays out it will vastly reduce a lot of bickering and back-and-forth between users, carriers and IP-PBX vendors.

We're basically creating a profile and are trying to create a clearer set of rules. This is not to say that without SIPconnect you can't do SIP trunking. It's just that the downside will be that there's a long troubleshooting research phase trying to figure out what the other side is doing. And if either side of the equation isn't forthcoming that's where you run into situations where things don't work and nobody knows why.

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Originally published on www.networkworld.com. Click here to read the original story.

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