Monthly Archives: October 2013
Current Trends in Unified Communications
I’ve been in this industry longer than I care to admit. I was working at Northern Telecom in the 1980’s when we announced something called “The Digital World.” Not to be confused with the IP-PBX which came years later, this was the transformation away from analog telephony to digital telephones and ISDN. Speaking of the […]
Calculating Bandwidth for Video Calls
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog on determining the bandwidth used by voice calls in Calculating Bandwidth for SIP Trunks. Now, while voice is an extremely important aspect of SIP communications, the beauty of SIP is that it isn’t limited to strictly voice. On my various PC and smart phone clients I do […]
Gartner’s Top Ten and SIP
Every year I anxiously wait for Gartner to release their 10 Ten Strategic Technology Trends. Yes, I am nerdy like that, but I will admit to a level of excitement seeing which trends survived from the previous year, which ones were voted off the island, and most importantly, what the new trends are. Since I […]
Teaching SIP
Every couple of months or so I teach a SIP class. Although it is billed as “An Introduction to SIP,” in two and a half days I dig much deeper than “what is SIP and why is it useful?” I explain every one of the SIP request methods and the most important response codes. I […]
Proving it with SIP Authentication
My name is Andrew Prokop and I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I have brown hair and green eyes. I grew up in Arizona and still think of the Sonoran desert as my second home. I could go on and on with these so-called “facts” about me, but how do you know what’s true and […]
Calculating Bandwidth for SIP Trunks
Ever since the dawn of the PBX, businesses have had to calculate their estimated telephone usage in order to properly size the number of trunks coming into and out of the building. In the case of TDM, you ended up with the number of physical trunks. This would equate to the required number of analog […]
Ducks Go Quack. SIP Goes Prack.
The first release of nearly everything typically leaves something to be desired. Not only are there the inevitable bugs, but it’s nearly impossible to think through every use case that might be applied. This was clearly true with SIP. When I first began working with SIP in the late 1990’s there were quite a few […]
Tao, Zen, and Tomorrow 