Speaking of Standards

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.

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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!

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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…

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sip, sip forum, sipit, standards, ietf, voxeo, prophecy