A Delayed SIP Revolution

The SIP revolution has been massively delayed, but there's hope on the horizon, says Brough Turner, CTO of NMS Communications.

Brough goes back to 1996 and says SIP was very compelling, but the revolution of cutting out the middle man never took place. While Skype was able to integrate presence, IM, wideband audio and video into a voice client, Skype isn't SIP.  And VoIP technology has helped drive down the price of international phone calls, but MGCP, H.248 and H.323 have gotten more play time than SIP. Sure, SIP is in IMS, but  IMS is so centralized it's the complete opposite of the original vision for SIP.

SIP assumed the possibility of seamless end-to-end connections, but "middle boxes" like firewalls and NATs got in the way. To get around/through them, ICE came along, but ICE relies on protocols such as STUN, TURN and/or RSIP.

Maybe there's hope in the future if IETF can get a peer-to-peer (P2P) version of SIP going, akin to what Skype does today, opening up the world to a SIP-based open P2P communications system.

For more:
- Brough Turner's SIP revolution [1] manifesto at CircleID

Related articles:
The power of VoIP in Adobe Flash [2] 10
Direct SIP addressing [3]? Not so fast