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March 10, 2003
H.323 deficiencies and SIP opportunities
When I met with Cisco last week, we talked at length about H.323 architecture. I had heard about H.323 being a telco-mindset-inspired protocol, but had not delved deep enough into it to see how that might be the case.
Frankly, I was quite surprised at the immaturity of H.323 architecture. Obvious components (at least in the data networking workld) like distributed architecture and redundancy are not available. Traffic is managed through local gatekeepers with statically-defined sessions to other gatekeepers at other sites. Sure, H.323 can be used point-to-point, but that creates a nightmare for managing an H.323 network. It was hard not to see the telco psychology showing through the design.
I haven't read much about SIP yet. But if it's like any other IETF response to a ITU standard, it will replace the telco psychology with an network user perspective. Redundancy, interoperability, scalability, flexibile distributed management and functionality are some areas that look like a competing protocol could beat out H.323. I need to get a book to see if the SIP standard tries to address H.323 deficiencies like the ones I've seen.
Posted by pete at March 10, 2003 07:59 PM
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