What are critical issues with VoIP service?

 VoIP services are rapidly becoming the bread and butter of enterprise voice networks, as roughly 72% of all enterprise voice lines shipped by vendors in 2007 were IP-capable. Now that companies are definitively moving away from the traditional Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) voice networks and into Session Initiation Protocol-based (SIP) VoIP networks, we examine the VoIP industry's most pressing issues, including SIP interoperability, TDM-to-SIP transition services and VoIP security issues.

Is SIP interoperability still a major concern?

As Nemertes Research analyst Irwin Lazar puts it, "it's more a hindrance than major flaw at this point. Three years ago, a team of iLab engineers found that while different VoIP vendors could ensure basic connectivity between their SIP-based phones and devices, there were also "significant failure rates" for enterprise VoIP features and standard security parameters. Lazar says that today key basic VoIP features such as caller ID, message waiting lights, hold and three-way calling are "pretty well standardized," but that more advanced features such as multiple line appearances, call bridging and intercom still face significant SIP interoperability issues between vendors.

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