SIP- Session Initiation Protocol

In this technologically advanced world, being ill-informed of new technologies can cost you and your business. But it is never late to catch up to the new innovative and inventive ideas that have revolutionized our traditional means of communication and networking. One such building block of the newly advanced technologies of communication is SIP- Session Initiation Protocol. SIP is a protocol mostly complementary to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) as it provides signaling functions to it and enables one to make free audio and video calls. As a signaling protocol to initiate multimedia communication sessions, SIP is one of the pillars of VoIP that has great depth and flexibility as it is not just used to make voice and video calls but also sets up instant messaging sessions that have become the new fashion of communication. SIP initiates call, terminates call, control and change parameters of call (like add conference participants), notifies the availability of users and in effect manage the communication process effectively.

With SIP in use, businesses have reached new heights of advancement unexplored before, since the costs of communication comes down significantly, as you get to make effective use of free voice and video calls. One of the edges SIP has over other protocols is that it has been designed as a general-purpose protocol that initiates communication sessions between participants and that it does so in quite a simple but very reliable manner. Since SIP is modeled on the request/response model of HTTP and designed to be a text-based protocol, it makes it very easy to debug the messages it carry. So SIP is easy to code and easy to decode and more importantly as it is very flexible it can run over IPv4 and IPv6 and it can use either TCP or UDP. This means that more adaptability and flexibility allows it to avoid hurdles in transferring the messages it carries and the whole communication process becomes speedy and efficient.

VoIP is an ever expanding industry and SIP is an important part and integral building block of this industry which has liberalized the conventional means of communication. If you want to use SIP there are three things you need: SIP account, SIP client (interface) and a reliable internet connection.

Other than SIP, there are other signaling protocols as well which are used for communication over IP networks like Skype uses its own P2P design along with SIP, but since Skype is intended to be a paid facilitator for businesses, you can always search for other SIP providers with free services.