SIP trunking is moving forward, perhaps not as fast as many would like. But the steady progress SIP is making in both enterprise-to-enterprise and carrier-to-carrier transversals is signaling a broader shift in the industry: finally, a real conversion of TDM voice-centric business models that will transform the nature of enterprise-telecom services. by Ross O’Brien

SIP It Up

SIP trunking, like many highly anticipated innovations/evolutions in the IP communications world, is gaining traction, but adoption rates are still disappointing to most industry advocates and participants. Part of this frustration is certainly due to the normal stress caused by the communications industry’s perpetual hype machine, which always seeks to create a sense of urgency and revolution in every possible new technology.

And yet, it appears there is something slightly more than “normal” unmet expectations. In SIP trunking, we have an industry that is (perhaps uncharacteristically) working hard at creating unifying inter-operability standards, the absence of which is usually the primary hurdle for adoption of IP solutions, and most carriers now have some sort of service solution. Still, only a handful of the most technology-forward and visionary enterprises are committing themselves to SIP trunking. Some are blaming the lack of compelling unified communication (UC) applications, which would be the true catalyst driving peer-to-peer pure-IP transactions. If that’s the case, does that make SIP trunking deployment dependent on yet another IP technology “revolution,” one that is even further away, and one with a value proposition still yet to be clearly defined?

“Certainly, it is moving slower than expected,” says Olle Westerberg, CEO at Ingate Systems ( www.ingate.com), a developer of SIP-capable firewalls and security solutions. He sees this largely due to the fact that “there is still an enormous information gap on SIP trunking. Vendors aren’t explaining how it works–or even that it works.” This probably goes a long way to describing the Stockholm-based player’s development of an industry education portal, the SIP Trunk Network ( SIPtrunk.org). “As technologists,