Early in my career at Metaswitch, I was working on a small team trying to develop a simple audio conferencing product. We were working with a third-party vendor based in northern France, and my boss wanted to send someone on-site to speed up the testing. I admitted that I’d studied French at high school, but stressed that I was far from fluent – and I assumed there would be someone better suited than me.
Apparently not. A few days later, I found myself on a plane to France to help install and test this potential audio conferencing product with our partner.
I was just 23 years old, and I was woefully under prepared. In addition to the small language issue, I had never even rented a car before, I had never driven on the right-hand side of the road, I had never traveled for business before…
And now I was expected to install and test our very rough code, integrate it into a system involving equipment from two other vendors, and discuss the whole thing in French.
I remember wondering whether I should spend my evenings revising French grammar or reviewing the product documentation. Except there was no product documentation, so I focused on my French.
After arriving in France, collecting the rental car, getting thoroughly lost without the luxury of GPS, hitting a curb pretty hard, and eventually finding the customer site, I met the rest of the project team.
The customer engineers, naturally, were French. When I arrived I was introduced to just about everyone in the office – lots of handshakes, and lots of “Bonjours!”. And then, to my great relief, a representative from the other vendor arrived. He was from Atlanta, and his French vocabulary consisted of two words, “Merci beaucoup”.
That was it. Suddenly my awkward attempts at communication looked pretty good, and I finally found myself relaxing. In fact, once we started work, it turned out that the English / French translation challenge wasn’t such a big deal after all.
In our technical work, we were all speaking telecom
The customer engineers understood SIP, they understood call flows, they understood IP networking. We understood exactly the same things.
Occasionally I’d search for a French word. Occasionally they’d search for an English one. Our American colleague would smile, nod, and occasionally contribute an enthusiastic “Merci beaucoup!”
But often times, we didn’t really need words. We could communicate through diagrams and by looking at diagnostics – as engineers, we were all very familiar with the challenges of making software and hardware products work – and so our verbal communication was more of a bonus.
The language of technology and of telecoms is pretty universal.
Networks have language barriers too
That trip also reminded me that telecom interoperability isn’t really about getting every system to “speak the same language.” If you’ve ever connected equipment from multiple vendors, you’ll know that even standards-based products often have slightly different expectations. One platform might insist on a particular SIP header, another may require E.164 format for phone numbers , while a third has its own “special” interpretation of an RFC. None of the systems are necessarily wrong. They simply speak different dialects.
This is where Session Border Controllers earn their keep. An SBC doesn’t just secure the network or provide NAT traversal. It also acts as a translator. It can normalize SIP headers, manipulate numbering formats, rewrite SDP, or even transcode between different codecs. With a little effort, a good SBC can bridge these subtle differences between vendors so that each side sees the conversation in the format it expects. To the end users, it simply looks like the call works. Behind the scenes, the SBC has quietly translated one network’s language into another’s.
Perhaps the most important lesson is that successful troubleshooting begins with understanding the underlying concepts rather than memorizing product-specific behaviour. Engineers who understand SIP signalling, media negotiation, DNS, NAT, and RTP can usually adapt quickly when they encounter a new platform or vendor. The command names may change. The configuration files may look different. But the protocols are still solving the same problems. That’s why investing time in learning how the technology works is often far more valuable than becoming an expert in a single implementation.
At Award Consulting, we’ve spent many years helping service providers integrate networks from different vendors, troubleshoot interoperability problems. We’re most familiar with Metaswitch products, and we love working with the Perimeta SBC – but an expert engineer can translate these skills to other vendors, which is why our clients also ask for our help with the TelcoBridges ProSBC and the Oracle (former Acme Packet) SBCs.
If you need to turn up some new SIP trunks, connect to a new partner, or troubleshoot a stubborn SIP issue, we would be delighted to apply some of these SBC translation skills to your network. Just reach out and let us know about your situation.
