SIP Beyond VoIP: The Next Step in the IP Communications Revolution [Paperback]

Henry Sinnreich (Author), Alan B. Johnston (Author), Robert J. Sparks (Author), Vinton G. Cerf (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2005

VON Publishing’s latest effort is SIP Beyond VoIP, an extraordinary 333-page effort that picks up where previous books have left off about SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), the protocol that has revolutionized the world of VoIP. The book’s three distinguished authors relate in great detail how this versatile and extensible protocol has truly “moved beyond VoIP” and is now starting to have an impact on the whole telecommunication industry, including wireless and enterprise communications. Anyone who thinks that SIP has any real competitors will come away from this book in astonishment. “SIP Events” are the glue that even now integrates communications and applications. And “SIP Presence” may well be the “dial tone” of the 21st century. The book’s advanced discussion of SIP interleaves with such associated topics as DNS (the Domain Name Service), ENUM (electronic numbering), NAT (Network Address Translation) and firewall traversal, security, Peer-to-Peer SIP (P2P SIP) networks, SIP-based conferencing/collaboration and even accessibility to communications for disabled people. This heavily illustrated, footnoted and fully-indexed book also has a foreword by Vinton Cerf, who writes: “It is my honest opinion that we have barely scratched the surface of the various applications to which SIP may be adapted. If we have seen 1% of the applications of SIP so far, then there are still 99% waiting to be invented, developed or deployed. The generality of SIP will make it a major workhorse the Internet of this century.” If you think you “know” SIP, think again. Get this book–its authors will “set you straight” about SIP, once and for all!

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dr. Henry Sinnreich is Chief Technology Officer at pulvermedia. He was an MCI Fellow who contributed to the first carrier-based in-house SIP development at MCI and worked on the design of the SIP-based MCI Advantage flagship service. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the International SIP Forum based in Stockholm and is an active participant to the work on SIP and related standards in the IETF. His earlier book, Internet Communications Using SIP, co-authored with Alan Johnston, is considered the definitive reference on SIP-based IP communications. In March 2004, Dr. Sinnreich was featured on the cover of VON Magazine, referred to as the Godfather of SIP and in 2000 was awarded a Pioneer in Telephony at VON Europe. He is a guest lecturer at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas and speaks at various corporate and industry events worldwide. Dr. Alan B. Johnston is a Distinguished Technical Member at MCI and an architect of the first enterprise SIP VoIP product introduced in the US. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Johnston is a co-author of the SIP protocol specification RFC 3261 and editor of the basic and PSTN Call Flows Best Current Practices (BCP) documents RFC 3665 and RFC 3666. He has co-authored two previous books on SIP, is co-chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Centralized Conferencing Working Group and sits on the Board of Directors of the SIP Forum. Dr Johnston holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA. Robert J. Sparks is currently the Vice President of Research and Development for Estacado Systems. He has championed SIP technologies, building implementations at MCI, dynamicsoft, and Xten. Mr. Sparks is a co-author of the core SIP specification in RFC 3261 and several of its extensions in other standards documents. He co-chairs the IETF’s SIMPLE working group, chartered to develop a standard way to provide instant messaging and presence. He sits on the Board of Directors of the SIP Forum and leads the SIPit international SIP interoperability events and is also President of the open source SIPfoundry community. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a Masters of Science in Mathematics from Texas A&M University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 334 pages
• Publisher: VON Publishing LLC (October 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0974813001
• ISBN-13: 978-0974813004
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,197,515 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars SIP Beyond Nothing: A Lightweight Overview of SIP, August 5, 2006

By 

Mel Beckman (Oxnard not just a pretty name, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: SIP Beyond VoIP: The Next Step in the IP Communications Revolution (Paperback)

My first comment is about the title, which promises the book is about SIP beyond VoIP. But the book is virtually all about SIP circa 2003, and almost exclusively about SIP for VoIP transport. Other than a brief excursion into potential uses of SIP in emergency services and mobile communications (still for VoIP, however), the authors never deliver on the promise in the title.

The authors' discussion of SIP is competent, but not remarkable. There are better descriptions available from other authors (e.g. "IP Telephony: Deploying Voice-over-IP Protocols", Hersent et. al, ISBN 0470023597). When the authors talk about current SIP usage, they seem woefully out of touch. For example, they never once mention the open source SIP-based PBX software Asterisk, even though the book has a section on open source software. Asterisk has been a force of nature in the VoIP world since 2004. You'd have to be in a very high ivory tower to miss that.

Much of the book is a rehash of stuff you can read in the SIP RFCs. Sometimes the authors make simple things unclear, as when they say "A SIP transaction consists of a request and a final response." What about the intermediate 1xx responses? Aren't they part of the SIP transaction? The RFC says they are.

Other times the authors express puzzling opinions, such as "[We] believe the IP-PSTN telephony model does not qualify as true VoIP either." What, then, do you call the VoIP services sold by the likes of AT&T, Covad, Sunrocket, and Vonage offering cheap local and long distance phone service to PSTN destinations? I stand perplexed.

When the authors do roll up their sleeves to talk tech, they write a few intriguing paragraphs about a topic and then inexplicably stop, switching gears to the next subject. For example, the discussion on PSTN interactions begins to explain how early media, ringback and other in-band signalling works, then suddenly stops the discussion. Yes, one can scour the Internet for such information, but it would be nice for the authors to simply explain each topic to a consistent level of detail. If they aren't going to talk about things Beyond VoIP, as originally promised, they can at least give readers consistent depth of coverage.

All three authors have impecable credentials, each with a track record in the field and deep involvement in SIP's development. Beyond the misleading title, I expected more quantity and quality from these three experts.

A note on Amazon reviews. Whenever I see a five-star review I always check to see the reviewer's other reviews. It's amazing how often they have none.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a must" for everybody who has to do with SIP, July 20, 2006

By 

Laura Liess (Darmstadt, Germany) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: SIP Beyond VoIP: The Next Step in the IP Communications Revolution (Paperback)

The book is a must" for everybody working in the Internet and telecommunication industry and having to do with SIP, from engineers interested in SIP functional, architectural and protocol aspects to product managers looking for new ideas to build innovative communication products.

For SIP engineers, the book is an excellent, very good structured guide through the SIP protocol and its, meanwhile, quite numerous extensions, from basic SIP to SIP-based Presence, Location, Conferencing and Identity services and to the currently emerging peer-to-peer SIP technology. For each topic, the book contains the functional architecture description, the most important protocol aspects and examples. For readers interested to get more technical details, the book also refers, for each topic, to the relevant IETF SIP documents, which are free available at www.ietf.org.

For product managers, the book is a very good overview on the technical possibilities offered by the SIP technology to build new, innovative services, to offer secure VoIP services or to reduce the costs of the SIP infrastructure using an adequate architecture.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars review of SIP beyond of VoIP, July 14, 2006

By 

Jiri Kuthan (Berlin, Germany) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: SIP Beyond VoIP: The Next Step in the IP Communications Revolution (Paperback)

This book presents the most complete and up-to-date overview of the SIP technology I am aware of. The SIP technology has become quite complex over the years and the book has shown it is possible to cover the complexity in 300+ pages.

What I particularly credit the book for is it shows the whole SIP roadmap beginning with current status (basics of the sip protocol, sip services, presence, etc.) both deployment-wise and standardization-wise, work-in-progress in the industry (xcon conferencing,xcap provisioning), and ending with 'hot topics' such as peer-2-peer, interconnection of 'sip islands' and multi-network mobility. Even very tricky aspects such as NAT traversal have been addressed in this single book. The presented concepts are well provided with underlying details such as traces of SIP messages, call-flows and snapshots of devices in the market. Despite I consider my own SIP knowledge level over-average, I like to refer to the book for SIP aspects I don't deal with every day. With that, this book is a must-have for bookshelf of anyone who is seriously looking at SIP.