Why You Need SIP Protocol for Voice Communications
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the transmission technology for person-to-person real time traffic over the Internet. Its technical specifications come from the SIP working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force. SIP gives access to the public switched telephone network for voice data at 3 kHz bandwidth and common number dialing using Voice over IP (VoIP). It can also be expanded to handle IP telephony in conjunction with video and instant messaging. Future enhancements will enable SIP applications like video conference calls, application sharing, home monitoring, and interactive gaming for businesses in Fayetteville.
SIP is in most cases associated with a technique to provide the functionality of ordinary telephony over an IP network. It is replacing the older, less flexible protocols used in the old days such as H.323 and MGCP. These older protocols worked at a very low level to connect IP phones to the public telephone network. SIP, however, provides an elegant and well-defined way to network the enterprise. For example, SIP uses email addresses as the SIP address instead of a telephone number over the standard telephone network.
Prior to installing a SIP plan in your business, you should think about the appropriate configuration of your corporate firewall to support SIP. Many of the common firewalls already deployed in business offices are not developed to support the SIP protocol. First, SIP media streams are transferred over dynamically allocated UDP ports that are usually blocked on firewalls. Second, SIP clients within a firewall can not be accessed using IP addresses because these addresses are local and private to the LAN. Third, you need to ensure that either your T1 line provider or Metro fiber service is able to support the SIP protocol from your internal network to the outside world. Your IT manager will need to evaluate how to correctly support SIP to overcome these technical problems. By including a SIP proxy and registrar for controlling the firewall, it is possible to deal with complicated SIP situations for secure and private communications.
