IP Phone RIP

July 15, 2009 by Dave Michels

Over at No Jitter I did a feature on the beginning of the end of the IP Phone, and why I think 2008 will be its high mark in terms of sales. I need to address some immediate confusion –...

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By Dave Michels

Dave is an independent analyst and founder of TalkingPointz which is focused on enterprise communications. In addition to this (free and paid) content on TalkingPointz, he contributes to industry sites, can be found at major industry events, and provides advisory services to vendors and financial analysts.

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Discussion

Anonymous July 20, 2009

Read your article on nojitter about Desktop Ip phone and here ur IP Phone RIP. I take your point – but would like to point to one big misstep that the VoIP industry is taking. That is insisting on "SIP" protocol for desktop IP phones.

No two SIP phones can properly interoperate with a 3rd company's PBX – unless you want to go back to the Single Line Telephone (Black phone) feature world. Try doing a Call Waiting, or a Call on Hold, or Screened Transfer, or any of the myriad of PBX features – and you'll soon see the problem with SIP.

SIP is very much like H.323 in that each IP phone must have all the intelligence (added cost) but if two IP phones are sligtly different in the protocol implementation – forget about interoperability.

I can confidently say that this is where the problem is coming from. Users don't care which protocol runs to power their desk IP phone features – just like most don't know about the myriads of IP protocols that are running to bring you that youtube video, or say a particular website. SIP was designed to replace HTTP – and not proprietary telephony. MGCP on the other hand was and still is the best of both worlds (IP and telephony) for putting the best features in desktop phones. Once you put MGCP, the PBX (Call Agent) becomes the provider of features – the cost of IP phone can be reduced (no need for a lot of intelligence in the desktop IP phone) and you can continue to add many new features that can easily blow the socks off PC based phones, or Cell phones. SIP is appropriate for Trunking (peer-to-peer sessions) and a good replacement for ISDN.

From somoeone who has been working in VoIP industry – since the VocalTec and Netspeak era – and has seen H.323, SGCP, MGCP and now SIP as the one solution that will kick start VoIP on the desktop side.

Reply
Dave Michels July 20, 2009

I think this is an excellent comment – why Anonymous?

SIPs dark side is its interoperability. But certainly lots of SIP phones work on multiple phone systems – it seems Asterisk and Polycom have set somewhat of an interop standard for companies like Snom and Aastra to follow. It isn't great, but companies like Cisco, Avaya, and Mitel could effectively work to "meet" this informal Asterisk/Poly standard regarding SIP phones. That isn't really happening though.

If I recall correctly, MGCP standard came from Level3. Polycom, LG, and a few others made phones. They were really simple, particularly compared to SIP.

I wonder why MGCP stalled.

Reply
svtelindia December 22, 2009

Thanks for d info……

IP Phone

Reply
isdn feature phone February 5, 2010

this is a good info

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