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With the telephony business world focusing on Voice over IP (VoIP), numerous IP
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) vendors are offering rich new product lines
supporting VoIP capabilities, presence integration, and other enhanced
multimedia and location-based services. In order to achieve true convergence of
these technologies, PBX, phone and network vendors will need to design and
support products that will interoperate with each other based upon industry
standards. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is being widely adopted in the
industry [1] as a signaling protocol because it enables data and voice
convergence for devices and applications across a wide range of industry
sectors. SIP enables voice, video, Instant Messaging (IM) and other media, and
facilitates presence and location-based services. SIP's extensibility and
versatility enable rapid innovation of new, rich features, and rapid
deployment, and it has become a market enabler for VoIP PBX's and IP telephony
devices and applications. However, SIP's extensibility has also introduced
interoperability challenges as vendors differentiate by extending beyond
baseline SIP specifications. Implementation of rich features in a standard,
interoperable manner requires ongoing standardization and industry consensus.
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