If you are evangelizing the cost savings and convergence capabilities of SIP, but have customers that need more security and reliability, SIP over MPLS may be the answer.
SIP over MPLS provides an alternative to SIP over dedicated Internet access or SIP trunking — the more typical deployment approaches. The benefits of running SIP over MPLS, experts say, include improved call quality with low latency, less jitter, better capacity control and end-to-end quality of service. And, when it comes to security, MPLS avoids exposure to the public Internet, making SIP over MPLS more secure than over other transport options.
“You can choose how big your line’s going to be and then you can control what goes across those lines," said Jim Schmidt, director of sales engineering for US Signal, in a recent webinar hosted by the Technology Channel Association. “So in contrast to an Internet circuit where you may get a denial-of-service attack that could adversely impact your voice traffic, on an MPLS network, that’s not going to happen."
Within an IP network, SIP, or session initiation protocol, is used for establishing sessions, which could be as simple as a phone call or as complex as a collaborative multimedia conference.
MPLS, or multiprotocol label switching, transports any protocol, including SIP, through a wide area network by using tags or labels that define not only its destination but the class of service it should receive. It also creates a virtual private network for a customer’s traffic — in this case converged voice and data services — within the carrier cloud.
