Understanding the Major Reasons for SIP Network Catastrophes

Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP) technology is plenty beneficial, but many are wary of using SIP and VoIP because of its apparent associated bandwidth issues. Rumor has it that VoIP is sucking out all the bandwidth from networks like a pesky mosquito perched on your arm. To design a SIP that works and stays working, one must first come to understand the underlying causes of what can threaten its sustainability.

2013 may very well be the year that SIP becomes fully realized. Seeing how it’s used for communicating between different devices on a company network or across the Internet, the options are seemingly endless. TMCnet reporter Amanda Ciccatelli today reported that some of these can include two-way phone conversations and using VoIP or the LAN, WAN or a SIP trunk across the Internet to a service provider.

“Today, SIP allows businesses to take full advantage of all of the applications such as video conferencing, presence, and instant messaging that make up unified communications (UC), which has opened up a world of possibilities in how your businesses interact with customers, giving them a richer experience,” Ciccatelli further explains.

However, lo and behold, there are some roadblocks in the way. According to Telecom Reseller (News - Alert), the top three reasons that deter SIP and/or VoIP include:

• Jitter: “Voice Frame Size in MSEC or voice sample size forces the SIP…designer to balance voice quality with potential network delays which could cause jitter or voice packet loss,” the article says, adding that the larger the voice sample is, the better the quality will be; however, there will also be a greater potential for latency from other network and/or data packets, which can cause the voice to jitter.
• Echo: This is caused by three things; talker echo, listener echo and loss of interaction. While there are many causes for this commonly faced issue, it never fails to disrupt and disturb the speaker who is listening, but only hears a delayed echo of his or her voice, which then affects the entire experience.
• Delay: To avoid delays, test for them prior to implementation, the article suggests. Also keep in mind that delay can be influenced by human factors such as mouth-to-ear delay, it adds.

Telecom Reseller likens these obstacles to one’s health; if the network is the body, then these tiny components are like germs, and as we all know, some germs are far more deadly than others. This leads them to suggest in a recent article that these roadblocks can either cause a slight fever or a full-blown heart attack. In short, you can’t bet your life on Internet voice transmission unless you’re fully confident that your network, or body, is healthy (a.k.a. has successful voice transmission).

“While, there is a ‘modern’ SIP standard, it is not finished,” the article continues. “In the past SIP has been proprietary among vendors.  Today, there is a recognized need for a new, comprehensive SIP standard to allow users to accomplish what they want to do, as opposed to vendors’ trying to force users to buy their proprietary products and work as the vendors want to force users to work.”

Conversely, one thing we will leave you with that can help strengthen a SIP network includes avoiding transcoding. “Changing the number of bits sampled and quantized can dramatically impact the voice quality.  However, LAN-Local [and] Network and WAN-Wide Area Network bandwidth limitations may have an equal or greater impact. Echo can also occur as a result of Asynchronous Transcoding.”