When a telephone company’s network ends, and a customer’s network begins, it is crucial that the delivery of services is efficient, robust, and most importantly, lacks potential for security threats and attacks. That’s where the demarcation point comes in to provide the handoff in that delivery of service, whether it be SIP or VoIP.

TMC’s (News - Alert) group editorial director, Erik Linask, sat down with Steve Johnson, president of Ingate Systems, to discuss the role that an enterprise session border controller (E-SBCs) plays within the demarcation point. This talk was part of the Ingate Knowledge Base (News - Alert) series, which focuses on everything related to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), or a signaling protocol for telephony, telepresence, conferencing, and more.

As defined by Johnson, the demarcation point “represents a handoff from the service provider to the company, and vice versa, in the transition of, or delivery of, SIP, VoIP or other services that SIP may actually bring forward to the company.”

He stressed the importance of the demarcation point as a method for the service provider to determine the quality of service delivery, from one point to another. E-SBCs’ place in relation to the demarcation point is crucial, as it identifies and monitors the service levels a provider is delivering and whether it’s consistent to what the customer expects.

Ingate’s solutions provide delivery of files that help customers identify issues; extensive logging of calls; as well as the delivery of statistics on a call-by-call basis to develop a mean opinion score, which determines how good the service quality truly is. In addition, its product, the Ingate SIPerator, makes periodic test calls between E-SBCs and PBX (News - Alert) on a customer network, and between E-SBCs and a service provider network, to determine where these problems exist.

“There are a number of tools on the  device that make it a very valuable and very complete demarcation point in order to isolate and then repair problems, if there are any,” said Johnson.

In addition, the Ingate SIPerator provides many security functions built into it to protect the company from any possible intrusion, theft of service, or attempts of service attacks and malicious packets as part of the SIP delivery.

“The product allows the company to place PBX on the private side of the network and to resolve the problems,” said Johnson. “It makes this the most secure, robust and healthy implementation of VoIP that we can make it.”

Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet copy editor. Previously she was assistant to the editor at The Darien Times, a weekly newspaper in Darien, Conn., where she edited submissions, did page layout and design and helped manage the newspaper's website. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf