Graham Francis : The SIP School
Graham Francis
| The SIP Blog is just that; with opinion and analysis on all things SIP in the world of VoIP

March 2009

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Mitel 'endorse' The SIP School

March 24, 2009

Here's one were really proud of ....

Mitel 'endorse' The SIP School™

Birmingham, West Midlands, Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Birmingham based reseller; Vocale has gained another major endorsement for its SIP training and certification service and this time it's from Mitel Ltd.  Anshu Prasad from the Mitel 'SIP center of excellence' in Kanata, Canada says "Further to the successful introduction of The SIP School 'Mitel Style' and SSCA™ certification program into the Mitel Networks education curriculum, the Mitel 'SIP Center of Excellence' is pleased to announce that it fully supports and endorses The SIP School and the SSCA™ as its program of choice for SIP training and certification for its own technical staff, channel partners and clients."

 



SIP and Skype, the Wedding's on!

March 24, 2009

Well, what an interesting turn of events.  Skype has announced Skype for SIP (click here to join the beta)... What can it do for you?  Ok, I 'lifted' this from the Skype site, but it lays it out neatly...

With Skype For SIP, your business can:

  • Receive and manage inbound calls from the 405 million Skype users worldwide on SIP-enabled PBX systems, connecting the company website to the PBX system using Skype click-to-call buttons



  • Place calls via Skype to landlines and mobile phones worldwide from any connected SIP-enabled PBX, saving your business money with Skype's low rates



  • Purchase Skype online numbers to receive calls to the corporate PBX from landlines or mobile phones



  • Manage Skype calls using your existing hardware and system applications such as call routing, conferencing, phone menus, voicemail and call recording and logging - no additional downloads or training are required


Tom Keating wrote about a solution that allows outbound calls to the Skype community here, and this can be built on to make outgoing calls if PBX / Phone manufacturers can build the logic into their own products (more on this later as I'm going to try something out in the lab 1st - maybe with a Mitel PBX and the 3CX software based PBX)..

Now, a couple of things...

Firstly, this service will only support G.729 to start with?  Why not G.711 at least? and what about HD Audio?






Understanding SIP at UC Expo 09

March 13, 2009

An interesting day at the Unified Communications Expo in London, Olympia on 12th March (I kept away from day 1 on the 11th).  I spent most of it wandering around looking at other seminars and also talking to people about SIP ~ especially if they have any training requirements for their technical staff and what I found was that overall, people are still confused about SIP and even unsure if it's something they need training on at all..!  This confuses me as a lot of products on display rely on SIP and please don't tell me that everything works ok yet!  Or maybe it does as long as customers stay 'locked-in' to one supplier that has only tested SIP on their own kit and not looking to honor the principles of SIP by opening up networks and solutions so that the customer has more choice...  If this is so, they may as well carry on using their own proprietary protocols. But SIP is not going away, it IS being built into all PBX's and IP Phones and when you add SIP Trunking into the equation - it's a protocol that has got to be understood properly.

Anyway, our Seminar (in the VoIP business theatre sponsored by Siemens) on 'Understanding SIP' seemed to go down well to a packed house.  The main points I tried to get across in the seminar were:

1.       SIP is an evolving protocol so make sure suppliers can support what they sell.

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