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New standard could ease communication 
Thursday, February 01 2001
by Rory Kelleher


A Swedish firm backing a promising new communications standard has raised EUR10.5
million in second round funding from investors including GO Capital, 3I and
Argnor.

The standard is SIP, or Session Internet Protocol, and advocates say it
represents a new, universal standard for communication between all types of
Internet enabled devices. SIP was developed by the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) and promises to allow people to talk to each other, and communicate,
across all platforms with IP Backbone.



Users will be able to send each other text messages, use video conferencing or
join an interactive game no matter what device they are using to connect to the
Internet. The standard is terminal independent, so a mobile phone user could send
a text message to an e-mail account, or with a new Voice-over-IP backbone users
can hold a conference from a land-line with people connected from a Personal
Digital Assistant, PC or mobile phone.



Users are given a single address for all communication, in the form of
. The open standard means that users can initiate a communication
using voice, video, SMS messaging or any combination, regardless of device.



Chief Executive Officer Jens Lundstrom of Hotsip.com, the Swedish technology
company which received the funding to back its SIP applications and products,
said the new standard will do for wireless communication what http did for the
Internet.



SIP works by operating on an application level with a layer of software on a
server stack, rather than a infrastructure level, which allows the user complete
mobility, according to Lundstrom.



The protocol has been adopted as the standard for call control and development of
multimedia communications and services over third generation mobile networks.



Lundstrom said it is scalable and secure, but will involve a significant
investment in telephony networks.



Hotsip says that SIP is important for the shift from the old telecom
infrastructure to modern IP based networks.