Why You Need SIP Protocol for Voice Communications
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is the transmission protocol for person-to-person voice 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 deal with IP telephony combined with video and instant messaging. Future improvements will enable SIP applications such as video conference calls, application sharing, home monitoring, and interactive gaming for businesses in Clallam.
SIP is in most cases associated with a technique to emulate the functionality of typical telephony over an IP network. It is replacing the older, less versatile protocols used in the old days such as H.323 and MGCP. These older protocols performed at a very low level to link IP phones to the public telephone system. SIP, on the other hand, provides an elegant and well-defined way to network the enterprise. For example, SIP uses email addresses as the SIP address in place of a telephone number over the standard phone network.
Before installing a SIP solution in your company, you should consider the proper settings of your corporate firewall to support SIP. Many of the common firewalls already deployed in business offices are not designed to support the SIP protocol. First, SIP media streams are transferred over dynamically assigned UDP ports that are often shut 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 carrier or Metro fiber provider is able to support the SIP protocol from your internal network to the outside world. Your IT manager will need to evaluate how to properly support SIP to get around these technical problems. By including a SIP proxy and registrar for controlling the firewall, it is possible to handle complex SIP situations for secure and private communications.
