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snom370 First IP Phone of its class able to establish VPN tunnel

snom 370 Manufacturers of IP phones need to keep innovating and improving their products as the industry get more and more competitive. 

snom is a good example of that. It has managed to keep growing its marketshare in the industry not by selling the cheapest phones but by innovating and constantly adding valuable new functionality creating a feature rich, high quality product while staying truly cost-effective. 

snom recently announced that its top of the line model, the Snom 370, can act as a VPN client and connect to enterprise’s VPN server directly. The main benefits come twofold: security and NAT/Firewall traversal. I don’t know of any other IP phone among largest manufacturers that can do that now and anticipate a lot of buzz about it among enterprise users.

The snom 370 will work just like when a remote worker connects his PC with to a companies’ VPN ensuring that all data will be encrypted and transported on an IP tunnel. Sip calls information and media stream that usually travels unencrypted thru the public Internet and can be sniffed, but when on a VPN tunnel it all travels encrypted. The existing alternative to VPN, in which snom also pioneered and supported by some other IP phone vendors now,  is using application layer security functions like SRTP, TLS or SIPS but most IP-PBXs and Voip gateways don’t support that and if they do I still see a lot of interoperability problems special for SMB customers that dont have a large IT staff to build and maintain firewall rules and constantly maintain network security. This should be an area where the snom 370 will excell as the ideal remote executive secure tele worker IP Phone. Some of the system integrators / reseller would agree that in VOIP, traversing NAT/Firewalls is what bring more headaches.

To really understand the problem it is need a deeper understanding of SIP / SDP / RTP protocols. In the other hand many IT/networking technicians that are already familiar with VPN will find easier just to have the phone establishing a VPN tunnel carrying just another application. When the VPN session is established there is no way an ISP can identify or stop a Voip session. Once the VPN session is established and all certificates and encryption keys are exchanged the phone will be just like in the remote network where the IP-PBX is, so no worries about NAT anymore.

snom will be releasing version 7 shortly for all its models, other cool new features will be available… stay tuned.

Henry

Posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 8:10 am under ABP BLOG, Advanced Solutions, Asterisk Focus, IP-PBX Solutions, ISP/ITSP BLOG, VAR Partners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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