Why You Need SIP Protocol for Voice Communications
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the communications protocol 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 extended to deal with 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 Maverick.
SIP is in most cases associated with a means to emulate the operation of typical telephony over an IP network. It is replacing the older, less versatile protocols used in the past such as H.323 and MGCP. These earlier protocols worked at a very low level to connect IP phones to the public telephone system. SIP, on the other hand, provides a sophisticated and straightforward way to network the enterprise. For example, SIP uses email addresses as the SIP address instead of a telephone number over the standard phone network.
Before setting up a SIP plan in your business, you should take into account the appropriate configuration of your corporate firewall to support SIP. Many of the typical firewalls already deployed in business offices are not designed to support the SIP protocol. First, SIP media streams are transferred over dynamically allocated UDP ports that are normally closed on firewalls. Second, SIP clients within a firewall can not be accessed using IP addresses since these addresses are local and private to the LAN. Third, you need to ensure that either your T1 line broadband provider or Ethernet fiber provider is able to support the SIP protocol from your internal network to the outside world. Your IT manager will need to ascertain how to properly support SIP to get around these technical challenges. By including a SIP proxy and registrar for controlling the firewall, it is possible to deal with complex SIP situations for secure and private communications.
