IPv6Style
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“SIPit 18”, a technology event where SIP device vendors from around the world gather to perform interoperability tests, was held at the Akihabara Convention Hall from Monday, April the 17th through Friday, the 21st.
This is a private event where companies and researchers, who develop SIP-ready devices and systems, gather with their devices in order to perform interoperability tests. Since it is not open to the public, it is relatively unknown; however, this is one of the industry’s major events, this time being already the 18th event, and this is the first time the event was held in Japan.
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Mr. Robert Sparks, SIP Forum, and Mr. Hiroshi Esaki, JPNIC
At the start of this event, a press conference was held by Mr. Robert Sparks, the chairman of the SIP Forum that organized this event, and Mr. Hiroshi Esaki and Mr. Shinichi Narita, a trustee and a secretary-general, respectively, of the Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC), which hosted the event.
Mr. Esaki explained the significance of holding SIPit in Japan and of JPNIC hosting it. He pointed out that, although the SIP market is expanding, there are still issues. He stated that “Although the Japanese SIP/VoIP market has been growing, apart from the testing within Japan, we can’t say that interoperability testing is done thoroughly at the global level.” He said that it is important “to be able to connect Japanese devices when they go out into the world, or conversely, to be able to connect devices from around the world when in Japan. Also, [it is important] to be able to resolve issues when troubles occur.” He also said, “This is something that JPNIC needs to do.”
As for Asia, they say that SIPit was held only in Taiwan in the past; there were very few participants from Japan. However, since it was hosted by JPNIC this time, the number of participants from Japan greatly increased; out of about 60 organizations and about 160 SIP-related device developers and engineers who participated, one-third were from Japan.
Although the purpose of this event is interoperability testing, since SIPit is an event that companies and engineers voluntarily participate in, there are no common tests prepared by the host. Each participant determines what kinds of tests they perform within a network environment with a large amount of diverse devices connected to it. However, Mr. Sparks gathers the information on the troubles and bugs found during the tests and will use them as a springboard for discussions at IETF and such.
SIPit was held for the first time in 1999 at Columbia University. At the beginning, they say, there were many errors due to many different interpretations of the SIP specifications and also due to bugs in the specifications themselves. However, they say that implementation issues have been increasing with each event. In the last SIPit, several hundred implementation errors were reported, compared to a few errors in the specifications.
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All the participants gather in the event hall and perform interoperability testing
Since the SIP market is in the course of growing right now, there are many new players entering the market. They say that 30-40% of the SIPit participants are new players. Because of this, they find some SIP devices act funny not only in the application layer, but also in the network layer. The network in the SIPit 18 event hall is managed by the WIDE Project. They say that various problems keep happening and the entire network goes down several times a day while performing testing. However, since the purpose of SIPit is clearly testing, those devices should not be excluded, but rather the problems need to be investigated by connecting these devices to the network as much as possible.
Mr. Sparks says that, after these sorts of problems were overcome, the many tests resulted in three clear outcomes. They are: “overall, user interfaces for SIP devices has been improved”, “configuration has become simple”, and “information on messaging and presence, other than audio, has been integrated”. He also says that there is actually a product that is the result of the ideas that were generated when many “geeks” gathered and had discussions.
At SIPit, since there are companies who bring in products still under development, the participating company names are not announced. When I actually look around the event hall, I find a really wide variety of companies participating, including manufacturers known world-wide, venture companies that I have never heard of, leading communication companies, etc. Unfortunately, it is not open to the public; however, there are plans to exhibit the outcomes of SIPit 18 in one way of another at “INTEROP TOKYO 2006”, which will be held from June 5th at Makuhari Messe.
SIP Forum
http://www.sipforum.org/
SIPit Web Site
http://www.sipit.net/
INTEROP TOKYO 2006 (Japanese)
http://www.interop.jp/
