My wife had been anticipating this long Labor Day weekend for a while.  On Thursday, she gave me an ultimatum:  clean out the basement of all of my old IT books, training manuals and the veritable graveyard of technology products or she’ll do it for me.  In working on the task, I happened across the notes from the first lecture I attended on an upcoming telecommunications technology of the future called “Voice over IP”.

While fondly perusing through some of the pages I was aghast to see what I had highlighted more than a decade ago: 

H.323 is THE de facto protocol for VoIP.   

Now, a decade later we are aware of this long history of VoIP and have witnessed what happened when a relatively lesser known and smaller protocol called Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) posed a challenge to the giant H.323.  In summary, if the genesis of the VoIP protocols were a movie trilogy, the movies would be titled accordingly: 
    Part 1: The Rise of a Protocol {SIP} 
    Part 2: The Protocol Wars {H.323 v/s SIP} and 
    Part 3: The Revenge of the SIP-th.  

However, students from the University of Maryland did a more scientific study on the comparison of H.323 versus SIP and concluded that, "SIP provides far lower complexity, rich extensibility and better scalability".  Not to mention lower resource utilization and ease of deployment of new services and features.  Additionally, the mere fact that major telecommunications companies (we know who they are) whose products previously relied only on H.323 are now widely advertising their products as SIP capable, SIP enabled or SIP inter-operable shows that SIP is the protocol of choice for VoIP today. 

But alas, I have spent my time blogging and not enough time on the basement.  It’s time to go rescue my treasures that are now sitting on the curbside.  However, the sanitation department can have my stuff on H.323 along with my audio cassettes and laser disks.