AS THE TELECOM INDUSTRY STRUGGLES TO keep afloat in rough seas, there is a growing consensus about the proper course for the telecom industry to take as it attempts to navigate towards the safer waters of sustained profitability and growth.

Business sense suggests that developing and deploying new, differentiating & enhanced IP services is the only way out, which can pump up both subscriber demand and service provider profits. One of the brighter spots in Telecom today is SIP. Now let’s try to define and decipher ‘SIP’ itself. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol. SIP is an Internet proposed standard documented in RFC 3261 for setting up, controlling and tearing down sessions in the Internet. Sessions include, but are not limited to, Internet telephone calls and multimedia conferences. SIP is also used for instant messaging and presence. That said, SIP is a simple and flexible call control and signaling protocol that enables the rapid and efficient development and deployment of innovative third-party converged applications in service provider networks.

SIP is flexible and has a distributed architecture, much like PC architectures in the IT world where the intelligence for call control and features are on distributed devices, rather than in centralized, huge and clumsy systems, usually reckoned as legacy systems. Such distributed /end devices include SIP proxies, SIP Application Servers in the network and SIP UA (User Agents) like a SIP phones or soft phones (PCs) at the edge of the network. This contrasts to the centralized model of the TDM world where processing and control intelligence reside on large phone switches (telephone exchanges) or servers in the network core.

SIP has surely captured the imagination of people who are pushing next-generation applications. SIP based unified messaging, programmable servers and instant messaging as key targets for developers. It has ignited new thinking within the development community about how to make communications a fundamental segment of the Data world. Also, it has empowered the Telecom community to explore the Data Infrastructure to the fullest for the entire suite of voice based applications, which nobody could have dreamed about without having to use the old-age TDM circuit switched infrastructure. SIP toolkits are also gaining traction in the marketplace across a wide range of applications, including those for unified communications, ASP services, computer telephony integration, wireless multimedia personal communications, IN-to-next-generation Telco feature migration and IP phones.

The world of networking is undergoing a sea of change: fixed and mobile networks are converging; computing and communications are becoming inseparable. The ubiquity of IP is transforming the data infrastructure into an all-encompassing communications capability that overshadows the PSTN. At the center of this evolution is SIP: it is the mechanism that unites services across platforms, thus creating a multiplicity of new possibilities.

The technology versatility provided by SIP allows service providers to set up either a centrally controlled telephony network via use of softswitches and distributed gateways or to tap into the existing PSTN via SIP proxy servers and gateways in a less-centralized, lower-cost model, as some service providers have already done. The standardized PSTN interface extension of SIP, known as SIP-I, has been vital to achieving the flexibility to deploy IP communications enhancements from a PSTN foundation. The ability to build IP-based value-added features without having a next-generation network in place has been the core of the strategy, adopted and pioneered by aggressive niche start-up players in this convergence space.

Let’s talk about basic telephony features which are well understood- messaging, prepaid calling, Centrex or conferencing, on the assumption that the end points are traditional phones, and, then as the end points become more intelligent. In the first case with traditional phones there is nothing much one can do about it, as the feature base (programmable intelligence) is with the centralized switch. If we move on to the second case where we have new-age IP phones, it provides lot of intelligence at the user premise, where one can load new functionalities and features to the box.

This brings about a huge change in how voice & non-voice applications would be built, customized and marketed and these would be the areas where niche players need to work out their offering plans. Also, the excitement that SIP creates is that you can take an understood application like conferencing and extend it, which in the case of XP could mean using the ‘presence’ features of Windows to allow you to connect all parties to a call with the click of a mouse, no matter where they happen to be when the call is initiated. What all this adds up to is a service provider with a new value proposition to end users going well beyond just simply saving a penny or two per minute. People today want personalized service and people are ready to pay for such premium services. These are the kind of business propositions that SIP brings to the table for any service provider.

‘Click 2 Commerce’, which is how I would like to coin the business opportunities that are brought in by SIP, I think would grow significantly in the time to come. For me, ‘Click 2 Commerce’ is something where with just a mouse click, there would be lot of value added from an end-user perspective, depending on the kind of service invocation. For example, either the user can conference his umpteen number of buddies instantly, or, enterprise users sharing files, diagrams for business discussions. Whatever it be, SIP in the near future is going to bring commerce at the click of a mouse button. This is the kind of ease and flexibility it promises, with no other IP technology nearing its match. Adding to this is the rush for SIP in the mobile world. 3G mobile standard group are working overtime to make SIP the protocol for multimedia communications over packet switched mobile networks. 3G is such a big opportunity for everybody in the mobile space that everybody is interested in moving about as fast as humanly possible to cash in on the next big wireless revolution and using SIP as their ammunition to further their ends.

Clearly, the field is wide open for developers to move ahead with applications that exploit the ability of SIP without waiting for new infrastructures. The obvious advantages have attracted disparate groups ranging from international call bypass service providers to 3G mobile service providers to SIP based platform. The new architecture is demonstrating that it holds the key to incremental growth wherever the market wants to go with IP voice.

By all appearances, those niche domains will be a much-needed source of new revenue for application developers and service providers alike in the near term and, in the long term, could become a major tide in the flow of IP communication commerce.

Although telecom vendors and service providers must still weather the telecom storm, the course has been set. SIP and SIP services offer unprecedented opportunity. SIP’s ubiquity, simplicity, and flexibility make it a compelling technology for navigating your way to the calm and safe waters of profitability and growth.

SIP carries the banner of Internet-style innovation into the traditional world of telco voice services. It preaches openness, interoperability and flexibility. It smashes the tyranny of rigid 64kbps circuits and opens up voice to software developers.

Ramachandran Iyer is Technical Manager for LeapStone Systems. He has over 7 years of experience in Telecom Systems, involved in Switching, Call Processing, Signaling Systems, VoIP, Broadband among others. He has consulted with Telecom corporates like Nortel, Ericsson and Cisco.