On the other hand, there are now many proprietary voice/video communications platforms NOT based on SIP, with some of them adding SIP support only as an afterthought/additional-cost feature. I don't think the authors of SIP envisioned this, and it's unfortunate. It was intended to be as widespread as email, with a similar diversity of implementations of varying interoperability.
I think issue with SIP is that it is and was driven by the industry. And I wouldn't call it exactly simple or easy protocol to follow and implemented. Thus many alternatives or self-made solutions are more likely to be chosen. It does a lot, but at the same time it is increasingly complex protocol. At least compared to others.
I'd love in SIP was more normalized for most people, so you just bought a data sim (and mostly used wifi) and didn't have to port a number around. I guess wireless market is so competitive the carriers really want to avoid this.
SIP has been an amazing standard that untethered me from the triopoly of cellular providers in Canada.<p>For the cost of a data-only SIM ($15/mo), I can call, text, and surf. I only need to be wary of the 3gb cap.<p>For those in EU/Asia, can you believe that here, that is considered an amazing deal? It's still unfathomable outside of North America, but imagine that everybody else pays at least 4-5x more than I do.
One sad thing about SIP that despite being pretty common here in Czechia, it is only used as a last hop to PSTN instead of as an independent federated network.<p>It makes economic sense - it is hard to monetize running SIP servers for independent network (and one cannot use ads like with e-mail as SIP clients are not web apps), but you can monetize selling access to PSTN.<p>Today, with WebRTC, one can build web client for SIP, but WebRTC VoIP services are still just silos.
Happy SIP user for nearly twenty years, which allows me to bridge three countries. Currently using baresip [1] and finding it to be remarkably reliable, but is there any hardware phone out there that I can put on my desk? Or is the sane thing to do to get a handset and hook it up to a computer via say USB? I have tried at least twice over the years to gain some clarity on these questions, but maybe I am using the wrong search terms?<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/baresip/baresip" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/baresip/baresip</a>
The number of publicly-accessible SIP services has decreased significantly over the past few years:<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/tqXclNi" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/tqXclNi</a>
Can anyone recommend a good quality US-based SIP provider? (twilio is OK, but I need to connect physical Cisco phones)<p>I'd like to port my phone numbers from google, as I'm afraid the migration of the free domain may cost me my phone number in case of shenanigans (like google voice being considered separate of google mail etc)