9 ms·

20 Years of SIP – A Retrospective

89 points by psim1 4y ago

rr888 4y ago
I'd love in SIP was more normalized for most people, so you just bought a data sim (and mostly used wifi) and didn't have to port a number around. I guess wireless market is so competitive the carriers really want to avoid this.
- phowat 4y ago
  Absolutely, I remember owning a nokia n85 12 years ago which had native SIP support. I wish ios and android had this.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Early Android had it - wouldn't be surprised if it still exists now but has been hidden from the UI. For VoWiFI/VoLTE it's already using SIP anyway so there definitely is a SIP client. The only reason you're not given access to it is because carriers are doing their best to protect their obsolete business model, and despite the appearances, Apple is fully complicit as well.
    - wolrah 4y ago
      > Early Android had it - wouldn't be surprised if it still exists now but has been hidden from the UI. It's buried in the settings for the Phone app (the dialer) and AFAIK is often removed from OEM ROMs because of course it is. As a VoIP engineer, it's a terrible soft client. It works, barely, and has basically no features beyond bare minimum calling. I've tried to use it repeatedly over the years but always ended up on commercial softphones like Bria or GS Wave.
      - kevincox 4y ago
        SIP was actually removed from the ASOP dialer very recently. It was removed in Android 12 (released late 2021). The support was never great (it would reset to defaulting to SIM calls every reboot) but it worked and was reliable.
        bestham 4y ago
        SIP is the basis for VoLTE and VoNR. So in some sense iOS and Android still support SIP.
  - supertrope 4y ago
    Although Google stopped supporting the OS integrated SIP client and eventually removed it, you can install Acrobits Groundwire or Bria. Those support PUSH notification for incoming calls. Push is better than missing calls because the app got killed, or forcing the app to run 24/7 and severely shortening battery runtime. But the call quality will never be as good as the native phone app as that gets QCI prioritization.
  - TMSZ 4y ago
    I remember these phones had some interoperability issue: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mobiledevices/forum/all/nokia-e72-sip/1ae79fc1-7e0e-4fe5-87c5-aa9d8ae9c7a7 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mobiledevices/forum/all/... (technically all according to specification, but often not working for incoming calls). At the time Symbian was supported by pjsip though.
- supertrope 4y ago
  In the US market average customers can barely handle SIMs. Letting customers handle their SIP credentials would amplify number hijacking and customer side telecom fraud.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    I don't see any cases where customers are misusing SIMs that would expose them to fraud at a large-scale. What I see instead is customer service being staffed by monkeys that are too stupid to realize they're being social-engineered, don't care or are outright complicit in the fraud.
    - ggping 4y ago
      Having worked in customer service decades ago, I wouldn't call them stupid monkeys. Designing your 2F authentication around SIM-based telcom is perhaps more appropriate to obtain the title of "stupid".
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        I'm sure there are good ones in the mix but that doesn't match my experience with any mainstream consumer-grade carrier or ISP. It doesn't have to be that way but obviously until carriers are held accountable and/or their oligopoly is broken they have no incentive to improve things. While it's true that SMS 2FA is flawed, that still isn't an excuse for letting customers' phone numbers being taken over by very unsophisticated attacks, sometimes even if notes are added to the account (or a PIN) that explicitly warn against such attacks. Also, I'm not sure how much of "decades ago" is hyperbole but back in the day ISP/telco support was a great career path and would allow you to learn and move up the ranks towards a more technical position. Nowadays "support" in any customer-grade ISP/telco is a dead-end position that's there to be exploited as much as possible (in fact it's often outsourced to a boiler room abroad, probably right next to the tech-support scammers) and replaced by a new sucker as soon as you burn out. Obviously this kind of treatment doesn't attract the right talent nor inspire goodwill in said talent.
    - supertrope 4y ago
- jaywalk 4y ago
  It's been well over a decade since I've ported my number, but even way back then it was a fairly simple and straightforward process. I doubt it's gotten more complex since then.
  - julianlam 4y ago
    At least in Canada, the process is simple but still not instantaneous, unless you are porting between the big incumbent carriers (Rogers, Bell, Telus, and their subsidiaries—often referred to as Robelus). I ported my number out to VoIP.ms, and it included a four day waiting period... for no particular reason except to probably allow for some human to check a box.
userbinator 4y ago
On the other hand, there are now many proprietary voice/video communications platforms NOT based on SIP, with some of them adding SIP support only as an afterthought/additional-cost feature. I don't think the authors of SIP envisioned this, and it's unfortunate. It was intended to be as widespread as email, with a similar diversity of implementations of varying interoperability.
- psim1 4y ago
  It would have required much forethought to predict, in 2002, that realtime communications would be happening in the browser. Thus WebRTC was born. But a tragedy of WebRTC is that it is not by-default compatible with SIP. WebRTC authors could have specified SIP as the signaling protocol over websocket, but they left the spec open ended. I feel two ways about this: glad for choice, but disappointed that the choice most often made does not allow for interop with the "legacy" realtime communications protocol, SIP.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    There are libraries to do SIP signaling over WS/WSS with WebRTC from a browser (or whatever) that theoretically allow for interop with other SIP devices. In practice the fundamentals of WebRTC rely on things like ICE, STUN, and TURN for media so they're not going to be compatible with almost all existing SIP implementations - many of which can't even do interop with bog-standard vanilla SIP over UDP with standard codecs properly. As is often the case with SIP you're back to using some Session Border Controller or equivalent architectural component to make interop actually work reliably.
- Sean-Der 4y ago
  It is a shame. I don't see any easy answer. I am working on sfu-to-sfu[0] and hope it can make some traction. If we can get all the Open Source WebRTC servers working together, maybe there is hope? I believe WebRTC did the right thing. It was as flexible as possible to make it more palatable. You can standardized/codify things, but you can't undo it :) I am also really excited about WHIP[1] [0] https://github.com/matrix-org/sfu-to-sfu https://github.com/matrix-org/sfu-to-sfu [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-wish-whip/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-wish-whip/
Ekaros 4y ago
I think issue with SIP is that it is and was driven by the industry. And I wouldn't call it exactly simple or easy protocol to follow and implemented. Thus many alternatives or self-made solutions are more likely to be chosen. It does a lot, but at the same time it is increasingly complex protocol. At least compared to others.
- psim1 4y ago
  Why is industry-driven an issue? And compared to what others? On the contrary, SIP is as readable and understandable as HTTP. Someone who understands HTTP can learn SIP-based VoIP quite easily using their software/web background without needing a telecoms background.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  To me the fundamental issue with SIP is the recognition by vendors that a standard protocol is "here" while still being incentivized (of course) to implement vendor lock-in. It was also clear that SIP for trunking (with very basic call setup/teardown) was the path forward to replace PRI, POTS, etc. Consider government, large corp, etc purchase requirements. "Oh SIP is the standard. Cisco do you support SIP?" Cisco says "Of course!". Check the box and buy. Meanwhile at the time their ecosystem is 99% Skinny (their proprietary protocol) and SIP is an afterthought for anything other than extremely basic call functionality, trunking, etc. Even when pushed to release SIP firmware for their (at the time) $500 hardware phones the SIP firmware was so feature crippled you're literally throwing money away by using it. So everyone installs Call Manager to be done with it and have something that actually works. Even when Cisco got around to essentially being SIP native getting 30 year old features like hold, transfer, busy lamp fields, provisioning, etc working between vendors was nearly impossible. Repeat for just about every implementation in existence.
  - TMSZ 4y ago
    I do believe that Cisco SIP implementation in 7000 series phones is non-interoperable by design. One major issue is that they are sending SIP messages from different port than the port they are receiving on. Because of this they practically do not work with any kind of NAT and I haven't heard of any consumer service provider that would work with this (the standard behavior is to assume that port passed in Contact line might be incorrect). Some of phones from that line have "NAT" true/false setting, but some don't - when tracing changelog I saw that this setting was removed in later firmware version, but for many phones this earlier firmware version was never available.
zajio1am 4y ago
One sad thing about SIP that despite being pretty common here in Czechia, it is only used as a last hop to PSTN instead of as an independent federated network. It makes economic sense - it is hard to monetize running SIP servers for independent network (and one cannot use ads like with e-mail as SIP clients are not web apps), but you can monetize selling access to PSTN. Today, with WebRTC, one can build web client for SIP, but WebRTC VoIP services are still just silos.
- userbinator 4y ago
  and one cannot use ads like with e-mail as SIP clients are not web apps Don't broadcast radio and TV have ads too, despite being independent of any client implementation? (I hate ads as much as anyone, but it's possible to run pre/inter-call ads on a free call too.)
csdvrx 4y ago
Can anyone recommend a good quality US-based SIP provider? (twilio is OK, but I need to connect physical Cisco phones) I'd like to port my phone numbers from google, as I'm afraid the migration of the free domain may cost me my phone number in case of shenanigans (like google voice being considered separate of google mail etc)
- js2 4y ago
  I've been happy with Anveo for years now.
- mandrill 4y ago
  twilio has a few competitors--telnyx, bandwidth, plivo, vonage just name a few that you can port a number to for SIP.
- anderiv 4y ago
  10-year business customer of https://voip.ms/ https://voip.ms/ here. I have nothing but great things to say about their service itself, its reliability, and their support. It's also very inexpensive for what you get.
  - toast0 4y ago
    Technically, voip.ms is CA based, not US based. But they've got a lot of US infrastructure.
    - anderiv 4y ago
      You’re absolutely right. Thanks for the correction!
- F00Fbug 4y ago
  Callcentric provides a bunch of features for a great price. I ported over my two landlines over 10 years ago and love it. When my mom moved to a new state, I ported her number first so she could keep that number in her new place. If you're actively managing a large number of users and devices, I had great luck with OnSIP. They're not the cheapest game in town, but their management interface is top notch. They were always innovating and the architecture they disclosed was impressive; very focused on HA and performance.
achillean 4y ago
The number of publicly-accessible SIP services has decreased significantly over the past few years: https://imgur.com/a/tqXclNi https://imgur.com/a/tqXclNi
- TMSZ 4y ago
  Well, consumer SIP is mostly dead. 20 years ago mobile calls were quite expensive, now they are basically free. Also the marked matured, people are more educated in general and using default port was never a good idea.
ninjin 4y ago
Happy SIP user for nearly twenty years, which allows me to bridge three countries. Currently using baresip [1] and finding it to be remarkably reliable, but is there any hardware phone out there that I can put on my desk? Or is the sane thing to do to get a handset and hook it up to a computer via say USB? I have tried at least twice over the years to gain some clarity on these questions, but maybe I am using the wrong search terms? [1]: https://github.com/baresip/baresip https://github.com/baresip/baresip
- anderiv 4y ago
  There are tons of SIP-compatible phones out there. If all you need is access to a single SIP account, the Grandstream GXP1610 is very inexpensive (~$40 US) and will do the trick. They also have more expensive models that support SIP accounts.
- js2 4y ago
  If I understand what you're asking, I use an Obihai VoIP adapter so I can use any old phone, but there are also a variety of IP phones from Cisco, Obihai, etc.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Most business-grade desk phones support SIP.
  - anderiv 4y ago
    This is true. I will give the caveat, though, that some of these are vendor-locked. Meaning: you can't easily use them with 3rd party SIP providers. So, just be aware of this and do your homework on specific brands/models before purchasing to ensure you'll get something that will work for you.
- F00Fbug 4y ago
  Polycom phones are really great... I deployed VOIP for my employer some years ago and put in about 40 Polycom devices in 4 states. They're not cheap, but full featured and very well made. You could also get an ATA (https://www.amazon.com/Grandstream-HT801-Single-Port-Telephone-Adapter/dp/B06XW1BQHC/ https://www.amazon.com/Grandstream-HT801-Single-Port-Telepho...) and plug a traditional phone into it. I used one of these at home for a long time. Just realized it's still plugged in an running and I threw out my last analog phone over a year ago!!!
julianlam 4y ago
SIP has been an amazing standard that untethered me from the triopoly of cellular providers in Canada. For the cost of a data-only SIM ($15/mo), I can call, text, and surf. I only need to be wary of the 3gb cap. For those in EU/Asia, can you believe that here, that is considered an amazing deal? It's still unfathomable outside of North America, but imagine that everybody else pays at least 4-5x more than I do.

89 points by psim1 4y ago

I'd love in SIP was more normalized for most people, so you just bought a data sim (and mostly used wifi) and didn't have to port a number around. I guess wireless market is so competitive the carriers really want to avoid this.

phowat 4y ago
Absolutely, I remember owning a nokia n85 12 years ago which had native SIP support. I wish ios and android had this.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Early Android had it - wouldn't be surprised if it still exists now but has been hidden from the UI. For VoWiFI/VoLTE it's already using SIP anyway so there definitely is a SIP client. The only reason you're not given access to it is because carriers are doing their best to protect their obsolete business model, and despite the appearances, Apple is fully complicit as well.
  - wolrah 4y ago
    > Early Android had it - wouldn't be surprised if it still exists now but has been hidden from the UI. It's buried in the settings for the Phone app (the dialer) and AFAIK is often removed from OEM ROMs because of course it is. As a VoIP engineer, it's a terrible soft client. It works, barely, and has basically no features beyond bare minimum calling. I've tried to use it repeatedly over the years but always ended up on commercial softphones like Bria or GS Wave.
    - kevincox 4y ago
      SIP was actually removed from the ASOP dialer very recently. It was removed in Android 12 (released late 2021). The support was never great (it would reset to defaulting to SIM calls every reboot) but it worked and was reliable.
      - bestham 4y ago
        SIP is the basis for VoLTE and VoNR. So in some sense iOS and Android still support SIP.
- supertrope 4y ago
  Although Google stopped supporting the OS integrated SIP client and eventually removed it, you can install Acrobits Groundwire or Bria. Those support PUSH notification for incoming calls. Push is better than missing calls because the app got killed, or forcing the app to run 24/7 and severely shortening battery runtime. But the call quality will never be as good as the native phone app as that gets QCI prioritization.
- TMSZ 4y ago
  I remember these phones had some interoperability issue: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mobiledevices/forum/all/nokia-e72-sip/1ae79fc1-7e0e-4fe5-87c5-aa9d8ae9c7a7 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mobiledevices/forum/all/... (technically all according to specification, but often not working for incoming calls). At the time Symbian was supported by pjsip though.
supertrope 4y ago
In the US market average customers can barely handle SIMs. Letting customers handle their SIP credentials would amplify number hijacking and customer side telecom fraud.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  I don't see any cases where customers are misusing SIMs that would expose them to fraud at a large-scale. What I see instead is customer service being staffed by monkeys that are too stupid to realize they're being social-engineered, don't care or are outright complicit in the fraud.
  - ggping 4y ago
    Having worked in customer service decades ago, I wouldn't call them stupid monkeys. Designing your 2F authentication around SIM-based telcom is perhaps more appropriate to obtain the title of "stupid".
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      I'm sure there are good ones in the mix but that doesn't match my experience with any mainstream consumer-grade carrier or ISP. It doesn't have to be that way but obviously until carriers are held accountable and/or their oligopoly is broken they have no incentive to improve things. While it's true that SMS 2FA is flawed, that still isn't an excuse for letting customers' phone numbers being taken over by very unsophisticated attacks, sometimes even if notes are added to the account (or a PIN) that explicitly warn against such attacks. Also, I'm not sure how much of "decades ago" is hyperbole but back in the day ISP/telco support was a great career path and would allow you to learn and move up the ranks towards a more technical position. Nowadays "support" in any customer-grade ISP/telco is a dead-end position that's there to be exploited as much as possible (in fact it's often outsourced to a boiler room abroad, probably right next to the tech-support scammers) and replaced by a new sucker as soon as you burn out. Obviously this kind of treatment doesn't attract the right talent nor inspire goodwill in said talent.
  - supertrope 4y ago
jaywalk 4y ago
It's been well over a decade since I've ported my number, but even way back then it was a fairly simple and straightforward process. I doubt it's gotten more complex since then.
- julianlam 4y ago
  At least in Canada, the process is simple but still not instantaneous, unless you are porting between the big incumbent carriers (Rogers, Bell, Telus, and their subsidiaries—often referred to as Robelus). I ported my number out to VoIP.ms, and it included a four day waiting period... for no particular reason except to probably allow for some human to check a box.

userbinator 4y ago

On the other hand, there are now many proprietary voice/video communications platforms NOT based on SIP, with some of them adding SIP support only as an afterthought/additional-cost feature. I don't think the authors of SIP envisioned this, and it's unfortunate. It was intended to be as widespread as email, with a similar diversity of implementations of varying interoperability.

psim1 4y ago
It would have required much forethought to predict, in 2002, that realtime communications would be happening in the browser. Thus WebRTC was born. But a tragedy of WebRTC is that it is not by-default compatible with SIP. WebRTC authors could have specified SIP as the signaling protocol over websocket, but they left the spec open ended. I feel two ways about this: glad for choice, but disappointed that the choice most often made does not allow for interop with the "legacy" realtime communications protocol, SIP.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  There are libraries to do SIP signaling over WS/WSS with WebRTC from a browser (or whatever) that theoretically allow for interop with other SIP devices. In practice the fundamentals of WebRTC rely on things like ICE, STUN, and TURN for media so they're not going to be compatible with almost all existing SIP implementations - many of which can't even do interop with bog-standard vanilla SIP over UDP with standard codecs properly. As is often the case with SIP you're back to using some Session Border Controller or equivalent architectural component to make interop actually work reliably.
Sean-Der 4y ago
It is a shame. I don't see any easy answer. I am working on sfu-to-sfu[0] and hope it can make some traction. If we can get all the Open Source WebRTC servers working together, maybe there is hope? I believe WebRTC did the right thing. It was as flexible as possible to make it more palatable. You can standardized/codify things, but you can't undo it :) I am also really excited about WHIP[1] [0] https://github.com/matrix-org/sfu-to-sfu https://github.com/matrix-org/sfu-to-sfu [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-wish-whip/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-wish-whip/

Ekaros 4y ago

I think issue with SIP is that it is and was driven by the industry. And I wouldn't call it exactly simple or easy protocol to follow and implemented. Thus many alternatives or self-made solutions are more likely to be chosen. It does a lot, but at the same time it is increasingly complex protocol. At least compared to others.

psim1 4y ago
Why is industry-driven an issue? And compared to what others? On the contrary, SIP is as readable and understandable as HTTP. Someone who understands HTTP can learn SIP-based VoIP quite easily using their software/web background without needing a telecoms background.
kkielhofner 4y ago
To me the fundamental issue with SIP is the recognition by vendors that a standard protocol is "here" while still being incentivized (of course) to implement vendor lock-in. It was also clear that SIP for trunking (with very basic call setup/teardown) was the path forward to replace PRI, POTS, etc. Consider government, large corp, etc purchase requirements. "Oh SIP is the standard. Cisco do you support SIP?" Cisco says "Of course!". Check the box and buy. Meanwhile at the time their ecosystem is 99% Skinny (their proprietary protocol) and SIP is an afterthought for anything other than extremely basic call functionality, trunking, etc. Even when pushed to release SIP firmware for their (at the time) $500 hardware phones the SIP firmware was so feature crippled you're literally throwing money away by using it. So everyone installs Call Manager to be done with it and have something that actually works. Even when Cisco got around to essentially being SIP native getting 30 year old features like hold, transfer, busy lamp fields, provisioning, etc working between vendors was nearly impossible. Repeat for just about every implementation in existence.
- TMSZ 4y ago
  I do believe that Cisco SIP implementation in 7000 series phones is non-interoperable by design. One major issue is that they are sending SIP messages from different port than the port they are receiving on. Because of this they practically do not work with any kind of NAT and I haven't heard of any consumer service provider that would work with this (the standard behavior is to assume that port passed in Contact line might be incorrect). Some of phones from that line have "NAT" true/false setting, but some don't - when tracing changelog I saw that this setting was removed in later firmware version, but for many phones this earlier firmware version was never available.

zajio1am 4y ago

One sad thing about SIP that despite being pretty common here in Czechia, it is only used as a last hop to PSTN instead of as an independent federated network. It makes economic sense - it is hard to monetize running SIP servers for independent network (and one cannot use ads like with e-mail as SIP clients are not web apps), but you can monetize selling access to PSTN. Today, with WebRTC, one can build web client for SIP, but WebRTC VoIP services are still just silos.

userbinator 4y ago
and one cannot use ads like with e-mail as SIP clients are not web apps Don't broadcast radio and TV have ads too, despite being independent of any client implementation? (I hate ads as much as anyone, but it's possible to run pre/inter-call ads on a free call too.)

csdvrx 4y ago

Can anyone recommend a good quality US-based SIP provider? (twilio is OK, but I need to connect physical Cisco phones) I'd like to port my phone numbers from google, as I'm afraid the migration of the free domain may cost me my phone number in case of shenanigans (like google voice being considered separate of google mail etc)

js2 4y ago
I've been happy with Anveo for years now.
mandrill 4y ago
twilio has a few competitors--telnyx, bandwidth, plivo, vonage just name a few that you can port a number to for SIP.
anderiv 4y ago
10-year business customer of https://voip.ms/ https://voip.ms/ here. I have nothing but great things to say about their service itself, its reliability, and their support. It's also very inexpensive for what you get.
- toast0 4y ago
  Technically, voip.ms is CA based, not US based. But they've got a lot of US infrastructure.
  - anderiv 4y ago
    You’re absolutely right. Thanks for the correction!
F00Fbug 4y ago
Callcentric provides a bunch of features for a great price. I ported over my two landlines over 10 years ago and love it. When my mom moved to a new state, I ported her number first so she could keep that number in her new place. If you're actively managing a large number of users and devices, I had great luck with OnSIP. They're not the cheapest game in town, but their management interface is top notch. They were always innovating and the architecture they disclosed was impressive; very focused on HA and performance.

achillean 4y ago

The number of publicly-accessible SIP services has decreased significantly over the past few years: https://imgur.com/a/tqXclNi https://imgur.com/a/tqXclNi

TMSZ 4y ago
Well, consumer SIP is mostly dead. 20 years ago mobile calls were quite expensive, now they are basically free. Also the marked matured, people are more educated in general and using default port was never a good idea.

ninjin 4y ago

Happy SIP user for nearly twenty years, which allows me to bridge three countries. Currently using baresip [1] and finding it to be remarkably reliable, but is there any hardware phone out there that I can put on my desk? Or is the sane thing to do to get a handset and hook it up to a computer via say USB? I have tried at least twice over the years to gain some clarity on these questions, but maybe I am using the wrong search terms? [1]: https://github.com/baresip/baresip https://github.com/baresip/baresip

anderiv 4y ago
There are tons of SIP-compatible phones out there. If all you need is access to a single SIP account, the Grandstream GXP1610 is very inexpensive (~$40 US) and will do the trick. They also have more expensive models that support SIP accounts.
js2 4y ago
If I understand what you're asking, I use an Obihai VoIP adapter so I can use any old phone, but there are also a variety of IP phones from Cisco, Obihai, etc.
Nextgrid 4y ago
Most business-grade desk phones support SIP.
- anderiv 4y ago
  This is true. I will give the caveat, though, that some of these are vendor-locked. Meaning: you can't easily use them with 3rd party SIP providers. So, just be aware of this and do your homework on specific brands/models before purchasing to ensure you'll get something that will work for you.
F00Fbug 4y ago
Polycom phones are really great... I deployed VOIP for my employer some years ago and put in about 40 Polycom devices in 4 states. They're not cheap, but full featured and very well made. You could also get an ATA (https://www.amazon.com/Grandstream-HT801-Single-Port-Telephone-Adapter/dp/B06XW1BQHC/ https://www.amazon.com/Grandstream-HT801-Single-Port-Telepho...) and plug a traditional phone into it. I used one of these at home for a long time. Just realized it's still plugged in an running and I threw out my last analog phone over a year ago!!!

julianlam 4y ago

SIP has been an amazing standard that untethered me from the triopoly of cellular providers in Canada. For the cost of a data-only SIM ($15/mo), I can call, text, and surf. I only need to be wary of the 3gb cap. For those in EU/Asia, can you believe that here, that is considered an amazing deal? It's still unfathomable outside of North America, but imagine that everybody else pays at least 4-5x more than I do.