Service Provider Networks / (none) /

Vendors SIP new promise of telephony

By Jennifer Jones
InfoWorld, 09/13/00

Several Voice over IP vendors at the Voice on the Net (VON) show in Atlanta this week are debuting products based on a new Internet standard that is expected to spur the use of telephony applications.

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) promises to let Web developers more easily wind multimedia capabilities into Web applications.

SIP, an application-layer signal protocol for Internet multimedia conferencing, is now moving through the IETF (Internet Engineering Taskforce) standards-making process.

But at VON, companies such as Burlington, Mass.-based iBasis lined up in an interoperability session to show off new SIP products. Other participants included WorldCom, Lucent, Cisco, and Sonus Networks.

iBasis announced at VON that it will put into its global network a test environment that will let Internet developers try out new SIP-based products.

"We will see quite a bit of testing between vendors trying to show interoperability between new applications," said Ajay Joseph, senior director of Network and Services Architecture at iBasis.

Though iBasis and other vendors are pitching SIP-based products to service providers-which will then sell mostly to small to mid-size businesses-corporate enterprises are also expected to be drawn to applications such as Web conferencing, which will be enhanced by SIP.

Going after service providers eager for IP telephony capabilities to offer to corporate customers, Level 3 Communications on Tuesday introduced a new SIP-based IP voice service.

The new service, 3 Voice Exchange, was endorsed by service providers such as broadband company Allied Riser and TalkingNets, which will turn around and offer customers advanced IP network capabilities.

Level 3 partner dynamicsoft, in East Hanover, N.J., was also playing on the service provider quest for enhanced telephony applications.

At VON, dynamicsoft debuted its Session Management Suite 1.0, which let service providers work billing security and network management functionality into SIP-based telephony applications. The company demonstrated the new product with Cisco 3620 voice gateways and 7960 SIP IP phones to show features such as voice-enabled e-commerce solutions.

"We are really aiming for the whole market of small and mid-size businesses that don't want to take on the management of a PBX. But we are also working with larger corporations that want to add 'click to talk' and integrate other VOIP and Web-based solutions as well," said Joan Pindel, vice president of marketing for dynamicsoft.

Gains in VOIP through SIP and add-on capabilities such as third-party billing, network management, and security are also aimed at letting service providers attract larger corporate customers, Pindel said.

Using SIP, dynamicsoft officials envision voice applications that will work similarly to current instant messaging applications.

"The cool thing about SIP is that it has most of the things you need to build presence into an application," said Russell Bennett, dynamicsoft product manager for the Session Management suite.

Because "soft" or IP phones register a person's whereabouts, application developers can "turn that information around" and publish presence information for telephony applications on the Web, Bennett said.