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I was involved in the IETF in the 1990s and had a good friend who was one of the architects of SIP. I was not involved in SIP myself but marveled at how complic
by dn3500 4y ago
I was involved in the IETF in the 1990s and had a good friend who was one of the architects of SIP. I was not involved in SIP myself but marveled at how complicated the protocol was. I believe RFC 2543 (SIP) was at the time the longest RFC ever published. I had the impression that the complication was due to undue influence from bellheads. But looking back it was probably more due to the necessity of interoperation with the PSTN.
- RhysU 4y agoThose protocols are just plain mean. For example, RFC 3261 defined a non-transitive equality operation.
- somat 4y agoThat has always been my impression is sip. Every time I deal with it I go "There is no way you would invent something that complicated in a greenfield ip native environment, it is too full of odd gadgets inherited from telco land".
- mhandley 4y agoSIP didn't start out complicated. If you go back to the origial internet drafts Henning and I wrote, it was really really simple. Well, our original UDP-based SIP was simpler than Henning's TCP-based SCIP, but neither was complicated. It gained a little complexity when we merged our protocols, but it really gained complexity along the way to standardization as people kept wanting to cover telco-like corner cases. At the start, Microsoft and Intel had backed H.323, and SIP was just us academics doing our own thing. Everyone told us we had no hope against Microsoft and Intel. But SIP started to get traction when the telcos (particularly Internet MCI) started to get interested in VoIP and concluded that SIP (especially SIP proxies) fitted what the wanted better than H.323. The downside with having your main allies being telcos was that telco-stop kept creeping in, until in the end SIP was no longer simple.