Reduce Your Communication Costs With The Sip VoiP PhoneInternet telephony technology is moving ahead at a great speed. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is a new standard in Internet telephony which allows direct one-to-one voice communication over the Internet. It also allows instant messaging, video, data collaboration, application sharing and many other features. SIP is creating a revolution in Internet telephony technology just like what HTTP did for the world wide web and SMTP did for the e-mail. Nowadays all new VoIP phone connections are using the SIP standard and all leading companies such as Microsoft, MCI, AT&T and many others have supported this new protocol. SIP has enabled VoIP users to connect with other users all over the globe. SIP is a highly scalable protocol and that uses existing Internet services such as DNS. This is one of the primary reason why SIP is slowly replacing the earthswhile popular H323 protocol. There are numerous companies which offer SIP VoIP phone service to customers. Many small and big players in the telecom hardware industry are offering devices which are compatible with the SIP standards. Nokia, Palm, Grandstream and Sipura products that are compatible with SIP standards. SIP standards enables VoIP service providers to offer different services and this is the reason why all leading companies are quickly jumping into the SIP bandwagon. From the end users perspective the user application includes softphone, hardphones, webphones and messaging clients. Instruments include softphones from Microsoft and Counterpath, hardphones from vendors such as Cisco, Nortel and Avaya, gateways from Cisco and Sonus and ASP such as Vonage and sipphone. As the names suggest, SIP has become a standardized VoIP protocol with leading vendors producing devices compatible with the standard. There are various concerns that exist among vendors offering VoIP SIP phone service. Some of the them are regulatory aspects which are still not clear in some countries, setting up the network which still takes substantial integration efforts and there is lot of operational effort that is involved in the setting up and running of SIP standards. Other challenges include rarity of new applications and security are still concerns for VoIP operators who are adopting SIP standards. There are certain underlying factors in the SIP architecture. It needs to be noted that most of the intelligence is located in the end devices and the network remains fast and simple for better robustness. Addition of any new SIP application is possible easily and does not take much change in the network. Proxy servers maintain the central role in any SIP network integrating all the SIP components such as phones, gateways, applications and other devices by implementing routing logic. A very important feature of VoIP phone is the connectivity with PSTN services. Using a gateway which is an adapter that converts signalling and speech from Internet to PSTN and vice versa you can easily connect with anyone who is using a PSTN device. The flexibility of SIP has made it the most accepted standard in Internet telephony. Researchers are continously working on it to make it better and it would not be long before you start getting many more features from SIP. |