Speaking of Standards

Today SIPit coordinator Robert Sparks announced to several mailing lists that registration is open for SIPit 29, to be held October 24-28, 2011, in Monte Carlo, Monaco. The event has its own website at:

http://www.etsi.org/plugtests/SIPIT29/

and the “About” page gives a bit more detail.

I’ve written about SIPit events before – and we as a company have found them immensely valuable. They are a great place to bring your latest SIP software and hardware and test it against a wide range of other SIP implementations. Basically it’s an inexpensive way to get a week’s use of a better interoperability test lab than you will probably ever be able to build on your own.

The SIPit events also are great for our industry in that they help vendors make their equipment work better together… and the more we have of that the sooner we’ll be able to move beyond the PSTN and get the full value of rich communication possible in a pure IP communications environment.

I do hope many of you will consider going to SIPit 29!

The next SIPit interoperability test session, SIPit 28, will take place April 11-15, 2011, in Hunstville, Alabama, sponsored by Digium. As I’ve written about before, these SIPit test events are critical for our industry as they provide a way for companies to test out their support for the SIP protocol – and all of its various extensions – in a controlled environment.

If you develop SIP-related software or services, it would be a great use of your time to head on over to Alabama and do some testing. More info about the event and how to register can be found at the website:

https://wiki28-public.sipit.net/index.php/Main_Page

It sounds like they also have a great social event planned with the Space and Rocket Museum for all those folks who may also be space enthusiasts.

If you aren’t familiar with the SIPit events, this video interview I made with SIPit coordinator Robert Sparks may help:

The SIP Forum today announced that the next SIPit interoperability test event will be held November 15-19, 2010, in Taiwan, Taipei.  A website for the event is now up at:

http://www.etsi.org/plugtests/SIPit27/SIPit27.htm

As I’ve written about in the past and recorded a video interview about, these SIPit events are critical, in my opinion, to helping drive the overall adoption of SIP and open standards in communication systems.

If you are a creator of software or hardware devices that use the SIP protocol, SIPit events are a great way to test how well your equipment works with other SIP implementations. There is a fee, but it’s small for the week-long testing you get to do. More info can be found on the registration page.

P.S. You’ll note that this SIPit event is the week following IETF 79 in Beijing, China… so if you can make the travel work, it’s a great way to combine two weeks of open standards / SIP – related events.

Do you create hardware or software that uses the SIP protocol? If so, what are you doing the week of May 17-21, 2010? Over in Stockholm, Sweden, many vendors will be gathering for the SIPit 26 interoperability testing event – and registration is still open if you are interested in attending. I’ve written in the past about SIPit events and even recorded a video interview last fall about why SIP interop matters. These events are important… and if you develop SIP-related software, I strongly encourage you to attend.

This SIPit26 event is, as always, organized by the SIP Forum and hosted by Edvina in cooperation with Tandberg, Intertex, Ingate and .se! More info can be found at the SIPit 26 site at:

http://sipit.edvina.se/

Courtesy of organizer Olle Johansson, this SIPit 26 event can also be found on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Olle, coming out of the Asterisk community, also wrote up a great post on “why SIP testing is important to Asterisk and to you“… the reasons he lays out are the same for really any of us working with SIP-related products and services.

This particular SIPit 26 event will have an additional aspect to it… the SIP Forum has partnered with the IPv6 Forum to promote testing of SIP over IPv6. Actually, the partnership is larger than that… but a specific outcome is that part of the drive of SIPit 26 will be to test how well SIP implementations work over IPv6. All good stuff… and help move along real-time communication over the Internet.

If you do have a SIP-based product or service, check out SIPit 26 and get there if you can… it’s a great opportunity to test your products and see how they work with other SIP-based products and services.

On Monday over on the Emerging Tech Talk video podcast, I posted a brief interview with SIPit coordinator Robert Sparks that I recorded at the SIPit 25 event held in September 2009 at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (IOL) in Durham, NH, USA.

In the interview, we covered questions such as: What is the SIPit test event all about? How does it make communications systems better? What do participants do at the event? How can companies get involved?

More information about SIPit can be found at http://www.sipit.net/
Robert Sparks has also posted a summary of the SIPit25 event at:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rai/current/msg00720.html

From a Voxeo perspective, I know that our test team gained some valuable insight into interoperabilty with products from other vendors. We’ll be incorporating what we learned into future versions of our product. Getting this type of real-time feedback is why the SIPit events are so powerful. We definitely hope that other vendors will join in to future SIPit sessions.

Meanwhile, here is Robert Sparks…

Technorati Tags: sip, sipit, ietf

SIPit 25 starts four weeks from today at the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab (IOL). What is SIPit? As the UNH-IOL page for the event says:

SIPit’s, or Session Initiation Protocol Interoperability Tests, are weeklong events where people bring their SIP implementations to ensure they work together. SIPIT Events are open to anyone with a working SIP implementation. The goal of the events is to refine both the protocol and its implementations. The SIPIT events are a driving force shaping SIP into a globally interoperable protocol for real time Internet communication services.

Basically, they are a place where vendors can privately test their SIP implementations against each other. Results of the testing are not publicly released – other than an aggregate news release talking about what occurred overall. It’s a place where, as a vendor, you get a great chance to see how well your SIP-based product interoperates with that of other vendors. It’s also a place where vendors will often bring early implementations of new SIP standards to test those against other vendors working on early implementations. All in all, it definitely helps with moving us all along the path toward increasing SIP interconnection.

We’ll have a Voxeo team at this SIPit. We’ve been based on SIP since we started our company back in 1999 and we’re continually looking at ways to increase our performance and support for evolving SIP standards. We value the feedback we gain from these SIPit events and try to attend when we can.

You can attend, too, as there is still space available. The UNH IOL event page has more info and there is an online registration form as well. (Deadline to register, though, is September 4th.)

P.S. And yes, since yours truly lives about two hours west of UNH, I *am* planning to head over and meet our testing team for dinner probably in beautiful Portsmouth, NH… I’m in “marketing” now, so they don’t let me near the test equipment. I mean, in my world, all the tests just work, right? And they have really pretty charts to go with them…

As I’ve written about before, we’re fans of the SIPit interoperability events that are sponsored by the SIP Forum as they provide a great way to test how well different vendors SIP implementations interoperate. We recently attended SIPit 22 at the University of New Hampshire and the feedback was extremely helpful in our continual effort to improve our products.

Anyway, SIPit 23 was recently announced for October 13-17 in Lannion, France. The event is hosted by the ETSI Interopolis Service and France Telecom-Orange Labs. ETSI has a website for the SIPit 23 event that is full of information about the event.

I don’t honestly know yet whether we’ll be attending, but I do encourage vendors to seriously take a look at attending. It’s a great place to learn how well your SIP implementation plays nice with others.

Technorati Tags: sip, sipit, sip forum, interop, interoperability, etsi

As we mentioned previously, SIPit22 was held April 14-18, 2008, up at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab. SIPit coordinator Robert Sparks has now posted a SIPit22 Summary which provides a view into the types of products that were being tested.

Now the summary is based on surveys filled out by individual vendors, so it relies on their accuracy (i.e. the information is not independently verified) but it makes for interesting reading. (I was personally struck by the fact that 42% of the SIP implementations indicated they had IPv6 support!) These summaries (older ones available, too) are useful in seeing what vendors are actually deploying and developing versus what we are discussing in the IETF. As noted in Robert’s final paragraph, the issue of NAT traversal for SIP still continues to be one of the most challenging aspects of interoperability.

For our part, attending SIPit 22 was very worthwhile as it gave one of our lead developers a chance to really test the improvements we are making to our SIP stack in an upcoming release of Prophecy. Stay tuned for more on that in the months ahead.

If you do have a product that works with SIP, we do strongly recommend that you do consider attending a SIPit event with your product. We’re a huge believer in open standards… and there’s no better way to test how “standard” your implementation is than to be testing it with a wide range of other vendors!

Technorati Tags: sip, sip forum, sipit, standards, ietf, voxeo, prophecy

What happens when a 100 or so SIP developers and engineers get together with all their gear? Well, starting today at the University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Lab in Durham, NH, those developers will be participating in SIPit 22 and testing the interoperability of their solutions with those of everyone else. Sponsored by the SIP Forum and currently coordinated by Robert Sparks, the events provide a place for SIP implementors to test out how well their products work with others’. When you attend, you essentially arrange with others there to test your product with theirs and do so. The results are not published… it’s just a place for engineers/developers to go and work together on interop. Summaries of what occurred are released and you can get a sense of what goes one through the summary of SIPit 21 this past November in Beijing.

As you might expect, since I’m writing about this, one of our lead SIP developers is up there at SIPit 22 with our Prophecy product. As we’re working on some improvements in our SIP support that we’ll release in new versions of Prophecy over the next year or so, he’s looking forward to testing our new work and learning how well it works (or doesn’t work) with many other SIP implementations.

Given that SIP is composed of so many pieces and there are so many options in the way in which you can implement parts of SIP, events like SIPit that foster interoperability are really a key way to helping the industry grow. It’s great to see the SIP Forum continue to sponsor the SIPit events and we look forward to participating more in the future. Meanwhile, we’ll be very curious to see what results are brought home at the end of the week…

Technorati Tags: sip, sip forum, sipit, standards, ietf, voxeo, prophecy