Oh the technology. I can hardly keep up. So today I come across to my boss like a complete idiot. Apparently a SIP phone is just a Voip phone. You know, it is really common now, using phone service over your internet. Well when my boss referring to a SIP phones and a soft phone, I didn’t know what he meant, but I just nodded and tried to play along. Then I bring up a voip phone as this great alternative. I didn’t know what his look meant. I have to know everything you know, so I immediately go home and Google it and find out they are all basically the same words for the same thing.  Softphones are another word for sip phones.  They are all internet phones I guess.  Well or so I think.  There may some nuance of a different, but I can’t figure it out.  Should I? could someone just tell me in laymen’s terms please?
 

When you go to the Wiki entry for SIP, to find out what in the world SIP stands for, it gives you several choices:

Server Interaface Pod is a dell product.

Scilab Image Processing is a Scilab product (and they are….. ??)

Simple IP is some phone thing for cellphones

System Idle Process  for windows NT

Soft Input Panel for your Pocket PC

But the one I wanted is:

Session initiation protocol, a computer network protocol often used for Voip telephony.
 

Any closer to understanding? I’m not either. But a little bit closer to not caring.  And why are all the SIP acronyms techno related? What about Stand In Person (in the film industry), or Sobbing Infant Protocol (the procedures you take from checking diaper to feeding to burping). Or when texting Stop It Pervert.
 

The whole reason it came up was because we send and receive an enormous amount of faxes. Archaic I know, but it’s what we do. So apparently there is a Microsoft fax service we can use, especially internationally, to save money on long distance for these faxes. The network fax is voip for faxes basically. Or so I think.
 

I gave up on my research. I hate not knowing something, but my boss told me recently, when I was asking question after question, that I really do not need to understand 100% of every single thing I ever hear about.  Knowing 70% of everything should be quite good enough.