The SIP Forum has announced that its next SIP Interoperability Testing event, SIPit 26, will be held May 17-21, 2010 in Kista, Sweden. The event will be hosted by Edvina and TANDBERG, and sponsored by Intertex, Ingate, .se, and the IPv6 Forum as an association sponsor.

Conducted by the SIP Forum twice a year, SIPits are the world’s premier interoperability testing events for the SIP, bringing together the leading SIP application developers, service providers and IP communications equipment manufacturers to ensure their SIP implementations work seamlessly together in an IP network testing environment. An important goal of the SIPit events is to help refine both the SIP protocol and its implementations in order to further establish SIP as a global interoperable standard for real-time Internet communication services.

"SIPit 26 brings together equipment vendors and service providers across the global IP communications industry to test and validate their SIP implementations in a live, real-world IP network setting in Kista, Sweden, a center of telecom technology in the suburbs of Stockholm,” said Marc Robins, SIP Forum President and Managing Director. "In addition, this spring event will also give companies the chance to test specifications from standards bodies such as the IETF, as well as recommendations formulated by SIP Forum task groups. A goal is to reinforce the progress that these groups are making to further establish the SIP protocol within the service provider, consumer and enterprise network environments.”

SIPit is organized by the SIP Forum’s Test Event Working Group and serves as a “plugfest” for participating companies to perform SIP interoperability testing with other participants in a live network environment. Conducted twice a year, with events rotating in the United States, Europe, and Asia, the SIP Forum has hosted 25 plugfest events around the globe. The previous event, SIPit 25, was hosted by the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab in Durham, New Hampshire in September 2009.

“The SIPit events are extremely effective testbeds, both for implementations and for specifications,” said Robert Sparks, chair of the SIP Forum’s Test Event Working Group. “We frequently have participants indicate that a week spent at SIPit provides results that would have taken months to achieve with individual pair-wise testing. Information about the state of implementation and interoperability of the specifications has been very useful in informing ongoing standards work.”

"Interoperability is the foundation for the TCP/IP protocol suite. As we move to realtime communications, it's important to test interoperability in all the platforms that are developed. For us in the Asterisk.org Open Source development group, it's been really important to participate in SIPit, where we can test, learn and improve our solution in a very open and friendly setting. SIPit is an important part of the success of the IETF Session Initiation Protocol," says Olle E. Johansson, founder of Edvina and developer of Asterisk. "We're proud to host this event in partnership with TANDBERG and thus become part of the success story of SIPit."