NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Business communications provider OnSIP today announced that the company has been awarded a patent entitled “System and Method for Geographic SIP Scaling,” U.S. Patent Number 8,650,243, issued on February 11, 2014. This patent is related to the geographic scalability and uptime of real-time communications services, including OnSIP Hosted PBX. The Manhattan-headquartered company OnSIP, also known as Junction Networks, was established in 2004 and now provides hosted VoIP services to over 20,000 businesses.
“Launching a Hosted PBX service can be fairly straightforward; Asterisk, Broadsoft, Metaswitch and other similar platforms come pre-built to support Hosted PBX businesses”
“This patent allows us to continuously scale our platform, transparently migrate customers around the OnSIP network, and provide a more robust infrastructure overall,” explained Eric Tamme, principal engineer and patent co-inventor at OnSIP. “Our services are geographically distributed and federated such that every single server can operate both cooperatively and independently of the others. For example, when Hurricane Sandy struck in New York City, all of our customers were redistributed to our data center in Los Angeles. Our customers experienced no service disruptions during this calamity, and it’s thanks to the architecture we’ve outlined in this patent. [The patent] is, for me, what defines and differentiates us from other providers and showcases our technically innovative, standards-based approach to real-time communications.”
This invention relates to session initiation protocol ("SIP") technology and more particularly, to geographic distribution and scaling of SIP technology. Example invention embodiments include: a distributed system configured to provide SIP multimedia communications service between SIP endpoints, identified by domain-based SIP Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs); an exemplary process for registering a SIP endpoint that utilizes a GeoDNS function to localize communications for the endpoint to the geographically closest SIP proxy server; an exemplary method for processing a SIP request; and an exemplary process of using the GRUU information to handle an out-of-dialogue SIP request.
Along with the uptime benefits associated to a geographically distributed communications platform, OnSIP's implementation of this invention also frees OnSIP customers from complications associated to NAT traversal. The patent describes NAT traversal mechanisms and a server-side NAT management approach, making it simple for customers to utilize OnSIP without relying on client-side NAT handling configurations or external services such as STUN.
“Launching a Hosted PBX service can be fairly straightforward; Asterisk, Broadsoft, Metaswitch and other similar platforms come pre-built to support Hosted PBX businesses,” said Robert Wolpov, OnSIP president and cofounder. “But as you grow as a service provider, redundancy, reliability and operational costs become limiting factors to offering enterprise grade, real time communications services over the Internet. That's why we set out years ago to build a bulletproof underlying architecture that could support a massive user base with nothing more than distributed commodity hardware. Our software engineering team was savvy enough years ago to recognize the need for such a core capability in order to avoid the unfortunate dilemma many in our industry face: indefinitely carry prohibitively expensive operational and vendor costs or crater under the weight of your own growth. Both of these approaches are bad for customers… This patent describes a truly unique, technically (and economically) advanced solution to a very difficult problem.”
Aside from geographic platform distribution for maximized uptime and scalability, OnSIP has also designed their platform for maximized quality of service. Such measures include: direct peering with Tier 1 service providers for shortest-path call routing (avoiding network hops that can degrade call quality), and maintaining a physically distinct network for real time media traffic to avoid congestion.
About OnSIP
Having helped over 20,000 customers, OnSIP is a leading provider of business VoIP services to businesses. OnSIP customers enjoy the benefits of a business class phone system, without the traditional high cost, burden, and inflexibility. For more information, visit www.onsip.com.