Podcast: UDP, TCP/IP and Microsoft
Creating a unified communication network on top of the Internet is complicated. Ingate President Steve Johnson tells Unified Communications Edge Site Editor Carl Weinschenk that his company's technology enables two different protocols to work together to simultaneously serve customers and support SIP trunks. (Podcast time: 22:37).
By
Carl Weinschenk | Mar 22, 2010
Ingate President Steve Johnson on TCP/IP, UDP and Microsoft:
[swf file="http://vid.itbe.com/ctoedge/ingatemarchx22.mp3"]
Like many elegant technologies, VoIP and its key underlying protocols – such as the Session Initiation Protocol -- are complex things. To use the still relatively new Internet and its IP language to replace the tried and true legacy phone network is audacious, and relies on a number of complex techniques.
At VoiceCon, which is being held this week in Orlando, Ingate Technologies described one such initiative. One of the main VoIP and UC platforms is, of course, Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS). Ingate is using the conference to show how its technology is being used to enable OCS to serve Northern Michigan Substance Abuse Services, which is headquartered in Gaylord, MI.
In this podcast, Ingate President Steve Johnson describes the challenge. OCS uses a common underlying Internet protocol, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP IP) to communicate outward with end users. However, another protocol – the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) -- is a more expedient way to connect OCS via Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks to destinations in the Internet cloud. Ingate's technology allows these two protocols to work together smoothly.
The key isn't the quality of Ingate's technology. The value of the podcast is to provide an illustration of one the many intricate steps that must be taken to make IP as robust as the network it slowly is replacing.
