SIP: Past, Present and Future

SIP Summit The Current Environment The Genesis of SIP Impetus Behind SIP How to invite users to mbone sessions Timeline 1996Mark Handleys SIP and Henning Schulzrinnes SCIP Interest grows in academic circles 1998Commercial interest arrives --MCIs Henry Sinnreich sees it as doing VoIP the Internet Way 1999IETF issues RFC in February Exponential increase in interest and support from service providers and systems vendors

SIP Summit The Current Environment SIP: Its Heritage Implementability is Paramount (IETF in General) KISS Consider the Big I (Internet) Do Not Dictate Architectures or Services General Purpose Functionality Leverage the Best of Existing Standards URLs MIME RFC822 Scalability

SIP Summit The Current Environment Today Industry and Trade Press Standards Body Acceptance Interoperability Business and Market Drivers Applications

SIP Summit The Current Environment Milestones in SIP Press May 2000 SIP Rules, Bill Michael, Computer Telephony Magazine First cover story in industry press on SIP February 2001, First comparison of SIP products, Network Magazine March 2001, SIP on the cover of Sounding Board March 2001, SIP discussed in The Economist Now reaching mainstream business press

SIP Summit The Current Environment SIP and IETF One of the most active IETF working groups Number of currently active Internet Drafts: 94 Number of documents to be produced as RFCs: 25 Three co-chairs and a working group administrator Consuming more time at IETF Split from MMUSIC, February 2000 SIP splitting again into SIP and SIPPING, Summer 2001 Three-nights-a-week Bar Bofs Regular multi-day interim meetings Several other SIP-based Working Groups SIMPLE PINT SPIRITS

SIP Summit The Current Environment SIP and Other Standards Bodies 3GPP and 3GPP2 3GPP R5 is based on SIP to the handsets IP Multimedia domain also SIP 3GPP2 has selected SIP for US Will be SIPs biggest customer if all goes well International Softswitch Consortium SIP for inter-softswitch communications SIP for softswitch to Application Server communications SIP under discussion for Application Server to Media Server Java Community Process JAIN SIP specifications – now completing SIP Servlets – just getting started ETSI Tiphon Architectures previously H.323 only, now SIP also ETSI Hosted SIP Bakeoff Conformance specifications

SIP Summit The Current Environment Interop Event Attendance

SIP Summit The Current Environment Products Commercially shipping products in many categories Small and medium sized gateways Large gateways Softswitches Standalone IP Phones Softphones Network Servers (Proxy, Location) Enterprise systems Application Servers Unified Messaging Servers Stacks Conferencing Servers Dialog Servers

SIP Summit The Current Environment Business and Market Drivers Market NeedTechnology Solution SIP Capability New RevenueConverged services combining Web, , IM, Presence URLs MIME Cost Reduction Relentless Specialization Inter-domain operation Simplicity Flexibility

SIP Summit The Current Environment Changes In Web Business Models Best-in-class companies have emerged at every layer of the business model Applications Transport AOL CompuServe Prodigy ASPs Applications & Hosting Backbone ISP Yahoo UUNET Hosting Companies ASPs Application Developers Application Platforms BEA WebLogic IBM WebSphere Ecommerce.com Accenture Exodus Backbone ISP UUNET ASPs Amazon.com Exodus Hosting Companies Backbone ISP UUNET Vertical Monolith Relentless Specialization

SIP Summit The Current Environment Changes In Telco Business Models Applications Transport AT&T Communications ASPs Applications & Hosting Converged Carriers Dialpad Webley Level (3) Genuity Vertical Monolith Relentless Specialization Communications ASPs Hosting Companies Converged Carriers Level (3) Genuity Hosting Companies Communications ASPs Application Developers Application Platforms Converged Carriers Level (3) Genuity What were once Voice Services are now split between converged applications and converged networks

SIP Summit The Current Environment Wholesale Carrier Services Origination Service Customer gets block of PSTN numbers Customer gives provider IP addresses to send calls to Calls for those numbers reach provider, and are routed to customer Termination Service Customer generates SIP calls destined for PSTN numbers Calls are sent to provider, and they are gatewayed to the PSTN Toll Bypass PSTN offload Purely cost savings Private IP Networks

SIP Summit The Current Environment A Wholesale Carrier Network Firewall Edge Proxies Firewall Control Proxies Core Routing Proxies Regional POPs Regional Routing Proxy Gateway Managing Gateway

SIP Summit The Current Environment SIP ASPs as O/T Customers FAX service providers Unified messaging providers iConnectHere (deltathree) Webley Voice Portals Tellme, Quack Huge origination drivers Conferencing Providers Residential VoIP providers IP Centrex Providers Click-To-Dial Providers E-Stara

SIP Summit The Current Environment Benefits For the ASPs No need to own, manage and operate gateways No need to have global PSTN connectivity Focus on applications and services Cheaper For the Providers Great way to generate lots of minutes Economies of scale allow them to make profits yet still provide low cost service Overall: Relentless Specialization

SIP Summit The Current Environment Where are we now Lots of products No major vendor without SIP products shipping or announced Varying degrees of maturity Long-time players reaching carrier grade quality Lots of trials and lab evaluations (since last year) Commercial light-ups happening now (Level(3)) Services are replicas of existing circuit services or modest improvements SIP is still unknown to the broader community Does not have the market breadth of XML or HTTP

SIP Summit The Current Environment Looking Forward: Services Services are governed by access Black phones predominant Black phones + PC elsewhere Desktop phones + Desktop PC Wireless phone with IP access (2.5G) PC VOIP Terminals Successful services in 2001 will be based on black phone access with PC assistance 2.5G provides a huge opportunity for true converged services Can link call control and data, presence and IM PC VoIP will remain niche for some time Cant carry it with you Not always on

SIP Summit The Current Environment SIPs Challenges In summary: Becoming a Victim of its Own Success You cant make everyone happy Many proposed extensions/changes for narrow problems or niche markets Protocols that do everything end up failing Must accept that we cant solve all issues Becoming more PSTN-centric Distributed, general purpose end-to-end model being tainted by legacy Overlap dialing Privacy/Malicious call trace The model is NOT the same so the protocols should not be the same

SIP Summit The Current Environment SIP Challenges Death by Wireless SIP follows Hourglass IP model Works for all underlying network technologies Better efficiency/performance can be obtained through wireless optimizations Changes in wireless technologies will obsolete these optimizations We must keep SIP independent! Vendor proprietary extensions Several large companies known for making protocols their own Vendor proprietary extensions can achieve vendor lock-in and improved services – in the short run Internet Drafts do not make it a standard We are already seeing this from the usual suspects We must keep SIP open and standard!

Information Resource Jonathan Rosenberg