The SIP Forum (News - Alert) today announced its second annual interoperability testing event, SIPconnect-IT 2013, which aims to help drive industry-wide adoption of the SIPconnect 1.1 Technical Specification. This five-day event will be held from May 6-10 at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory's  (UNH-IOL (News - Alert)) facility in Durham, NH.

The first SIPconnect event, SIPconnect-IT 2012, took place just this past December, also at the UNH-IOL.

“Following upon the success of the first SIPconnect-IT event, SIPconnect-IT 2013 will once again offer the IP communications engineering community an important venue to put the theory and ideals of SIPconnect 1.1 into action and continue the hard work of identifying and ultimately resolving key internetworking issues related to SIP trunking,” said Marc Robins (News - Alert), SIP Forum president and managing director, in a statement.

SIPconnect-IT 2013 is organized by the SIP Forum's SIPconnect-Interoperability Certification Task Group (SC-IT TG), formed specifically to develop test plans, Interop (News - Alert) events and conformance tools for the SIPconnect 1.1 Technical Specification. The group also aims to identify and solve "interworking" issues, while developing a comprehensive SIPconnect 1.1 Compliance Program that will create a formal testing certification program for compliance.

The primary goal of SIPconnect-IT 2013 is to provide a venue for attendees to perform technical interoperability testing between products and services based on the SIPconnect 1.1 Technical Specification, while ensuring adherence to the SIP requirements defined by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).

The event will be hosted by the UNH-IOL, which focuses on testing services for data, telecom and storage networking technologies. The lab also offers confidential, vendor-neutral testing that is recognized throughout the industry as evidence of interoperability and conformance to technical standards.

Back in October, the SIP Forum formed a new task group called the SIP over IPv6 Task Group, which aims to develop a roadmap for the telecommunications industry's transition over to IPv6 for SIP applications.