Kate Rance, LightBound Account Manager

LightBound, an Indiana VoIP sevice provider, offers Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SIP is a widely used signaling protocol. It is used in voice and video calls over Internet Protocol (IP) by using the TCP/IP based Application Layer protocol.
LightBound can supply its Asterisk-based phone customers with SIP directly. If a customer does not have an Asterisk based server, a VoIP gateway would be required to translate the SIP line to the existing phone system.
As SIP is becoming more widely used its benfits include: reduced equipment costs, using a text-based protocol that allows for direct inspection by administrators, and the User-Agent field is sent in request messages, which means that the receiving SIP server can see this information; which can be useful in diagnosing SIP compatibility problems.