The Chicken or the Egg

I arrived yesterday at Interop to see walk the floors and determine if this show was ready for SIP Trunking. Eighteen months ago, we had a booth at Interop in New York City and the visibility and interest afforded SIP Trunking was bleak. We decided not to attend again until that situation changed. I was disappointed to see it has not changed yet. There is much mention of network LANs, WANs, VPNs, Wireless LANs, GigE, cloud computing, etc... VoIP seems to be discussed primarily as a private corporate networking thing. This is good in that eventually, an enterprise will determine that if its private communications meets certain levels of quality and reliability, perhaps they should explore using am ITSP like Broadvox, just not today.

Walking the floor revealed the mention of SIP Trunking three times. Adtran used it with the NetVanta IP PBX solution. (Adtran is already a Broadvox partner.) Another company was offering a SIP Trunking reliability module. It was mostly focused towards the enterprise but there was a module to support multiple SIP Trunking service providers. (I decided we should speak to him about interoperability.) Finally, there was one telecom broker offering SIP Trunking. Not much foot traffic and when I stop to ask about their offering, I found I was talking to show models. No one with authority was in the booth. (Still...I'll talk to them about becoming a reseller of our services.)

But, all of this begs the question, "Why is Interop, a show about digital technology, lagging behind other shows when it comes to SIP?" It may be the fault of the ITSPs. We are not here. We are not on the panel discussions or offering any breakout sessions. We are the invisible ones. We are most responsible for educating and promoting our product offering. Until that happens, why should Interop become a venue to discuss VoIP/SIP Trunking?

Which comes first, a discussion of VoIP/SIP Trunking or the ITSPs to Interop?