“From my perspective a formal SIP certification is important and fits the standard Mitel paradigm requiring technicians to be certified on products they are installing, configuring, and/or maintaining”
Michael Craig, Director, Quality and Education Services, Mitel

“Yes…We have mandated all our field Sales Engineers achieve SIP Certification.”
Mike Uttley, Senior SE Training Consultant, Level 3 Communications

“Vendor’s and business partners who carry an industry recognized and supported SIP certification have strategic advantage over their competition.”
Mark Rawlyk, SE Director, Avaya

The SIP School™ is the issuing authority for the SSCA® Certification. This survey may be a good time to see if people want or even need a SIP Certification. So we crossed our fingers and asked:

Q11: Is an ‘official’ SIP Certification important to you?

So, [Figure 10 above] suggests that a certification is very important. One of the ‘other’ response statements was ‘it is important to our customers’. With this in mind, showing clients that your support personnel have achieved a recognizable level of skills will install a confidence in them and may even help get their business as they will have confidence that your staff have the skills to help them if issues arise. This is echoed in the comments on this page.

“Although, it rarely happens, it is common for a company that has had great difficulty getting a SIP Trunk to work to return to a TDM solution.”
David Byrd, Broadvox

So, let’s take a step back and see what we’ve found out and hopefully learned from this Survey.

Firstly, there are still significant issues that arise when implementing SIP Trunks and these issues must be faced head on in order to make installations go smoothly. They have to be as clean as existing Digital and Analogue installations as that’s what the customer is used to and also expecting from all of the industry generated hype.

SIP Trunking is working in a lot of places where competent companies work together to ensure interoperability and continuity of service but looks like its hitting problems when it’s installed quickly and without careful thought for Quality of Service and ongoing service management. Customers can get exasperated when they can’t make or receive calls from their own clients and can resort to extreme measures.

Now here’s a story that should make you stop and think and I’m sure it will drive home the reasons for getting things right first time.

Vocale Ltd (the holding company for The SIP School) knows a lot of Telecommunications installation companies in the UK and one particular conversation with a CEO really shook up the notion that all is well in the move to SIP Trunks. Here’s his comment.

“I have a contact in a large service provider company that has told me, he’s never been so busy taking SIP Trunks out of customer sites and replacing them with ISDN lines”

 What on earth is that all about?

The conversation developed and it transpired that there are companies out there that don’t understand the principle of getting things right by planning, testing and monitoring installations and they are simply putting systems in, getting SIP Trunks connected, testing for Dial tone and then moving onto the next client. Customers were experiencing poor quality, dropped calls and SIP Trunks simultaneously dropping then reconnecting which caused them so many problems when trying to communicate with their own clients they simply said “Enough is enough, let’s rip everything out and go back to what works!” This frustration is mainly borne out of the lack of ownership when problems arose and installation companies pointed the finger at the ITSP who responded by blaming the installation people and guess who lost patience because they were in the middle and losing business? Yes, the client.

“It appears that many of the issues are human related and due to uneducated techies and probably a lack of good documentation by the vendors and providers.” Gary Audin, Delphi Inc

Recommendations

This survey shows clearly that issues occur during the installation and configuration of SIP Trunks and in order to make things as painless as possible for all parties involved there are some simple things that can be done and most of these can be done relatively quickly.

Firstly, it’s always wise to talk to all parties involved before moving forward. Get case studies from ITSPs and the manufacturers you are working with. Talk to their people about their installation experiences along with discussing the issues they have come across and how they overcame them. Talk to people about interoperability testing and conformance to standards and recommendations such as SIPconnect from the SIP Forum. In essence, good research and talking to people early on will help you decide which companies to work with.

If you are an enterprise looking for a SIP Trunking solution to suit your needs then ask ITSPs to respond to your business requests and see if they can cover everything you need from Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to support for the smallest of sites in the remotest of locations, even international locations. You need to ensure that everything can be covered by the ITSP and that they understand everything you need before things move closer to provisioning SIP Trunks. ITSPs should also be willing to let you trial SIP Trunking for free for a reasonable period of time. If so, then do it and test the Trunks using all the call scenarios you can think of such as call transfers, conferencing and so on. Also test the ITSP’s support people at various times of the day, why not call them at 6pm on a Friday evening and see what the response time is and the level of knowledge of the support personnel available?

When it actually comes to installation of the SIP Trunks the one thing that really stands out is the need for correct documentation that supports the configuration of the PBX and the SBC/Edge device in order to get SIP Trunks to register and work. In our own experiences we’ve found that installations go way more smoothly if educated and experienced people use documentation that is clear and easy to understand and also based on settings that have been proven to work in the combinations of equipment being configured. For example, if you are installing SIP Trunks from Verizon, connecting to an Acme Packet SBC and then into a Mitel PBX it’s important to check that these all interoperate and if so, get the configuration documentation into the hands of the installers. Again, make it easy for people to get it right the first time.

“TIA has officially endorsed The SIP School as the training provider of choice for SIP. Along with the training program, you (or your personnel) can now become officially recognized as a SIP expert by passing the SSCA® certification test.”

From the TIA website at tiaonline.org Once SIP Trunks are in and working it’s not the end of the story. To ensure they continue to operate and function at their best it’s wise to continually monitor their performance and also ensure that whenever any software upgrades are to be carried out on the PBX or SBC that these upgrades do not affect service. Again it’s wise to talk to manufacturers first before making any changes that may affect operation of the SIP Trunks. 

Conclusion

This survey has quite simply highlighted the need for all parties involved in providing a complete SIP Trunking solution to clients to work together and continually test their products and services for interoperability so that it’s not the customer’s premises that becomes the test bed.

It’s a one way street for SIP and VoIP services as people will one day be using these services exclusively. How quick this happens is up to the people providing the services.

The SIP School would like to thank all those who contributed with their valuable comments and insights.

About The SIP School
The SIP School™ is owned by Vocale Ltd and was founded in April 2000. It’s SSCA® SIP training and Certification program has become recognized as the globally accepted Certification for VoIP professionals to strive for. Organizations such as the Telecommunications Industry Association officially endorse the program and Bicsi value the program at 16 CEC credits towards their own certification.http://www.thesipschool.com/industry.html
Contact: Graham Francis, CEO graham@thesipschool.com

Details of more industry supporting companies can be found at

About Techistan
Techistan was founded on December 29, 2009, as an online news source and community of reporters and bloggers from the East and West who passionately collaborate in profiling and reviewing new technology products, people, and companies. In addition to covering startups, entrepreneurs, and inventors, Techistan reports on existing powerhouse companies that are making a difference, commercially or socially, online and/or offline. Visit the Techistan website at http://www.techistan.com/

Contact: Suzanne Bowen, VP Marketing, Editor in Chief at Techistan
suzanne@techistan.com

©Copyright 2011, All rights reserved. (The SIP School)

Click to study the SIP Survey Created by The SIP School and Sponsored by Techistan Part 1, 2, and 3 at Enterprise Connect 2011 in Orlando.

RIM (think “Blackberry and Research in Motion“) announces this week its Mobile Voice System 5 and a new device, the Blackberry Pearl 9100. The MVC 5 makes VoIP calling over WiFi for small business users more a reality than ever. Listen to a podcast and video of an example of a company already leveraging (for the past 3 years) RIM, IP PBX, and domestic/international direct inward dialing on iTunes #69 and Youtube.

The Mobile Voice System 5  works with Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager. It can find the location of a Blackberry that is connected via WiFi to an actual desktop phone number. As a result, users can send and receive calls like they are back in the office.

In February 2009, Omar Chohan of SACS stated, “The way we’ve been doing this for the past few years or so … Calls are routed via SIP into our PBX for example in our USA or Dubai office or while we are out anywhere just holding our Blackberry cell phone. They are provisioned as Blackberry calls One Number Reach. In addition, the MVS offering enables DID to be used as a mask for inbound and outbound calls. The caller ID will not be the Blackberry number but instead the DID from DIDX.”

These solutions that have been around long before this recent Blackberry announcement, as Chohan shows, enables individuals and organizations the opportunity to record calls, forward calls, block calls, call hunt and other things that the Internet-protocol based PBXs have enabled for many years.

Mobile Voice System 5, itself, will be available sometime in 2010. Meanwhile, check with your favorite vendors of IP PBX who leverage the RIM and other mobile platforms, wholesale or retail, on how to use this type of service in the future.

[viddler id-d0e7c7f4 h-333 w-437]

ohn starts his presentation with something like … instead of fearing PBX vendors who offer an alternative to traditional PBX, go the easy route and make them your ally. Resell IP PBX from an outsourced vendor and ensure quality of service since you control the network as an ISP.

On the other hand, John says, “Mobile phones fail on service and flexibility.”

(I was wondering if he has tried the Nokia e61i? I have one since May 2008 and find it a very useful and flexible tool. But then again, it is very difficult to find one. They are more popular in Europe and Asia and more easily available there from the local mobile companies. See my blog posts on mobile voip at http://suzanne.supertec.com/search?q=mobile+voip.)

Todd believes the mobile phone has not replaced the landline as the top choice of telephony. He mentions the IPhone as an example of inflexibility for business use.

(Check out the article that compares a Blackberry Storm to an IPhone at http://www.newsoxy.com/blackberry/article11516.html.)

Asterisk assists you to provide more interesting services more quickly. No matter where you use Asterisk whether at the customer premise or in your switching center, Asterisk can make your company clearly a better choice unless your competition also uses Asterisk.

John Todd states, “In which case, you’ve got to rely on that fundamental that you’ve got which is the network.”

And I guess he means here that the better quality your network and because of the control that ISPs have to manage their network, the better they can compete with other ISPs who use Asterisk who may not manage as well. But I personally think that customer service and company leadership matter just as much.

Most ISPs in the audience at ISPCON are selling PBX services and POTS and really SIP trunking which displaces existing vendors is basically what John added. He shared a chart with us