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!

While at SIPNOC 2011 last week in Herndon, VA, I shot a good number of photos of the presenters and attendees. I’ve uploaded some of the better shots to our Flickr account and you can view the SIPNOC set there:

I tried to capture most all of the presenters there. The images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license which essentially means that you are welcome to use them as long as you link back to the photo (if online) or provide an attribution link in written material.

If you are in any of the photos and want a higher resolution version for your own usage, please just email me and can get one to you.

For photography geeks, almost all of the photos were taken with my Nikon D90. A few were taken with my iPhone 4. Most were not altered but a few had the “Enhance” edit done in iPhoto.

As I mentioned before, this year the SIP Forum is holding its first ever SIPNOC: The SIP Network Operators Conference event on April 25-27 in Herndon, Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC. The abstract of the event is:

SIPNOC is a unique event for service providers and carriers to gather to discuss the challenges of deploying and implementing SIP-based communications technology, and to learn the best-practices and strategies that enable the successful and profitable operation of SIP-based services and applications. SIPNOC is not a sales event, a marketing event, nor an event for corporate positioning.

The tentative schedule is now out and as I note over on our page for the event, I’ll be speaking twice at the event. In one panel I’ll be wearing my VOIP Security Alliance hat and talking about communications security. In the other session I’ll be speaking about some of the lessons we’ve learned at Voxeo in building the large-scale, global carrier-grade SIP infrastructure we operate.

It should be a fun event and I’m very much looking forward to being down there in DC with the SIP Forum crowd! If you can join us there, it should be a great event for anyone operating a network using the SIP protocol.

Would you like to learn all you can about the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and how it can be used for real-time communications? If so – and if you will be attending the Enterprise Connect event this coming week in Orlando, Florida – you can stop by the 3-hour tutorial I (Dan York) will be doing on the afternoon of February 28, 2011. As our events page outlines, the session description is:

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has become the dominant protocol for IP communications. This workshop explains SIP —how it works, the major issues impacting deployments and how SIP will evolve in the future. There will be a major focus on SIP interoperability.

The session focuses on the technical aspects of SIP and how it is used. It analyzes in detail the major components of SIP architecture, SIP addressing and registration, session establishment, SIP message routing and connecting SIP across the PSTN. You will learn about SIP extensions and how SIMPLE works for IM/presence. The workshop also examines some of the challenges SIP faces, including NAT traversal (and the tools developed to cope with it: STUN, TURN and ICE) and security. The tutorial concludes with an assessment of how SIP may evolve and its role in peer-to-peer environments. You will receive an inventory of SIP resources—books, papers and organizations.

This tutorial was a great amount of fun to do last year (when the event was called VoiceCon) and I’m looking forward to teaching the session again this year.

If you are there at Enterprise Connect, please do come on by and learn about SIP!