SIP

In 1995, the first commercial VoIP products began to emerge. Without any established standards, most early implementations were based on proprietary technology. As these packet telephony networks grew and interconnection dependencies emerged, it became clear that the industry needed standard VoIP protocols. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF's) standard for multimedia conferencing over IP. The IETF began standardization of SIP in 1996.

SIP was designed as a multimedia protocol that could take advantage of the architecture and messages found in popular Internet applications. By using a distributed architecture, with web-like addresses for naming and text-based messaging, SIP takes advantage of the Internet model for building VoIP networks and applications.

SIP is being adopted by major telecommunications service providers around the world. Companies like Cisco, Lucent and Microsoft offers broad SIP support across their products. The 3G mobile community has also embraced the benefits of SIP, putting it at the heart of their network architecture.

SIP allows companies to build large-scale networks that are scalable, resilient, and redundant. It provides mechanisms for interconnecting with other VoIP networks and for adding intelligence and new features on either the endpoints or the SIP servers.

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