Cisco Cisco Customer Voice Portal Downloads

Choosing a Call Control Protocol

This chapter discusses using SIP, H.323, or both as your call control protocol with Unified
Customer Voice Portal.

Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal 4.0 provides the ability to switch calls using Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP) rather than, or in addition to, H.323. Only H.323 was provided in earlier
versions of CVP.

SIP is a network communication protocol for initiating, modifying, and terminating interactive
sessions between clients that involves multimedia elements such as voice, video, instant
messaging, and so forth. SIP is intended to provide a superset of the call processing features
available in the PSTN.

SIP is the preferred protocol for Unified CVP 4.0.

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SIP provides improved scalability and performance to Unified CVP.

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With SIP, you are able to interoperate with both Cisco and non-Cisco SIP edge devices.

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As a generic session protocol, SIP is better able to handle non-voice media.

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SIP is becoming a de facto industry standard.

H.323 support is primarily to provide backward compatibility for users of previous versions of
CVP. These are referred to as legacy deployments.

This section contains the following topics:

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Planning Guide for Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal 4.0(1)