Back to Sip….Why Enterprises Should Wait For Cheaper More Cost Effective Solutions.
I am not the “Professor” because I know a little something about VOIP. I am the “Professor” because I am an active participant in doing my part to “mature” open source VOIP. Eleven years ago, I witnessed the start of the VOIP revolution. Cisco purchased a company call “Celsius”. With this acquisition came the push for frame over frame-relay and the infamous “Cisco Call Manager”.
For me this became the very first commercial push for VOIP that I could remember. The enterprise was ready, but VOIP wasn’t. H.323 was built for voice and video, and found it’s niche being used to trunk particular gateways together. A VOIP gateway is used to mediate between TDM and standard IP. However, for signaling between the phones themselves and the callmanager, Celsius created SCCP, otherwise known as “Skinny”.
This was the first of many errors vendors made when developing products for VOIP. Cisco wasn’t the only vendor with a proprietary protocol used for delivering services and call setup in VOIP, all of the major vendors utilized proprietary protocols. Remember, this was in 1997 and even though companies bought into the idea of VOIP and cost savings, none of them had any models to build from.
Today, it is a different story. Carriers worldwide have converted their core infrastructure as a necessity to provide the service demands at a reduced cost. “Every” major telecommunications provider today provide phone service off a predominately SIP core. Meaning a call coming in from San Jose, CA destined for Boston, MA will be routed over a sip trunk over an IP backbone to terminate to a VOIP Gateway in Boston for call termination. A a cost savings mostly because of the compression ratio of proprietary Gateways on the market. (Some that offer up to 10:1 compression). Not only is sip being used for IP trunking, sip is also being used to provide phone service for Vonage and many of the most popular instant messaging clients worldwide.
VOIP offerings differ as you move out of the US. I have been a part of many projects in which IP phones are being used in the Residential and Enterprise domains in some cases making the need for tdm connectivity obsolete. Witnessing a housewife make a phone call via an 802.11 phone makes my heart warm. Still in the US we deal with corporations still rolling out proprietary units without looking at the maturity of the technology.
Each year more and more VOIP phones are arriving on the market. Cisco has devoted resources to develop their sip offering. They have already released SIP trunking capability in their product line. With the maturity of SIP and their competition growing, Cisco has to realize that their primary selling point, “their phones”, will be challenged by lower cost and equally reliable IP PBX solutions that offer Open Source interoperability and freedom to use any phone with equally as rich feature sets.
Sooner or later, people will realize that there is no true benefit by going with a specific VOIP vendor. Telephony will still be as autonomous as it was in the past, the only reliance is the infrastructure. And when that is realized, let’s see what Cisco comes up with next.
Note: I pick on Cisco, but Cisco is not the only vendor that tried to fight Open Source interoperability. However, it is the most successful vendor in promoting it’s VOIP porfolio as an enhanced feature set of it’s Network equipment offering.