Pushing SIP trunking

A range of IP communications vendors and service providers are continuing an uphill battle to promote SIP trunking. The latest efforts include workshops and a forthcoming draft of an updated interoperability standard.

Ingate is leading the charge and has organized a free three-day workshop called "SIP Trunking: Everything You Need to Know" at the Internet Telephony Expo in Los Angeles next week. Partners in the effort include Avaya, BandTel, BroadSoft, Cbeyond, Digium and Voxitas. The three day program includes a track introducing the concept of SIP trunking, several case studies including one featuring support for "American Idol," and a day long "SIP Trunking Boot Camp" for interested parties.

"There's a tremendous amount of misunderstanding as to what [SIP trunking] exactly is," said Joel Maloff, senior vice president of marketing for BandTel. "SIP trunking as the name of a service isn't all that sexy. People are not familiar with it, they don't really know about the benefits... the major effort needed on our part is educational."

Later in September, the SIP Forum will sit down with Cable Labs and representatives of cable companies to hammer out a draft of SIPConnect 1.1 - the next standard for implementing trouble-free SIP trunking between IP communications software and hardware manufacturers and service providers. 

SIPConnect 1.0, the existing standard, has helped a number of service providers identify interoperability problems, said SIP Forum managing director Marc Robins."There's a comprehensive survey that companies must fill out, they need to demonstrate that they're checking the right boxes. They have to stand up an actual demonstration, show that they're actually working with another company to do SIP trunking."

Robins expects a draft of SIPconnect 1.1 to be hashed out in the Cable Labs meeting and released in about "a month or so."

For more:
- Agenda for the three day SIP trunking seminar. Link [1].

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SIP Forum pursues interop [3]