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Microsoft And Cisco Work On ICE |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Monday, 14 November 2005 |
Microsoft has teamed up with Cisco Systems to work on ways to get VoIP on more desks. The two have agreed to back and develop technologies that support the emerging ICE methodology.
ICE, or the Interactivity Connectivity Establishment methodology, is a standards-based way of making universal VoIP easier and more secure.
ICE does things like allows information workers and businesses to easily communicate in media-rich ways across NAT firewalls. NAT traversal is something of a problem for large scale deployments in a secure environment and ICE provides a rich set of solutions for current NAT issues with media.
The ICE methodology was developed within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to address the impact of NATs on peer-to-peer media connectivity. Many proprietary media services traverse NATs by tunneling using HTTP or Port 80, but this approach is not as security-enhanced, robust or scalable as the ICE methodology.
"Finding a way for VoIP to work better across NATs and firewalls is a problem that is faced across the industry," said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president for the Office Real-Time Collaboration Group at Microsoft. "Microsoft and Cisco are encouraging our industry partners to utilize the ICE methodology to ensure more consistent, reliable experiences for our customers, and to improve Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based VoIP interoperability across networks."
"With service providers increasingly deploying converged voice-and-data services based on SIP, Microsoft's and Cisco's endorsement of ICE standards bodes well for our mutual customers," said Don Proctor, senior vice president of the Voice Technology Group at Cisco. "Our commitment to providing ubiquitous and seamless protocol interoperability in our IP-based voice solutions helps customers experience greater value in their converged voice, video and collaboration investments."
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