Teo Gets Government Nod for VoIP Phones

After years of testing and development, Teo Technologies, a communications technology company with more than 40 years of experience developing mission-critical solutions for the U.S. Department of Defense, announced it has received its first-ever certification by the DoD’s Unified Capabilities Certification Office (UCCO).

The certification is for Teo’s Assured Services Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (AS-SIP) End Instruments (AEI).

“Assured Services Session Initiation Protocol is the standard signaling protocol used within the Department of Defense information systems networks that provide End-to-End Assured Services,” explained Steve Hill, president of Teo. “This specification is based on commercial standards for SIP (e.g., RFC 3261) and additional DoD-specific requirements. Assured Services capabilities are provided by adding specific signaling elements to the SIP protocol.”

This is significant because Teo’s certification marks the first end-instrument to be approved with standards-based generic AS-SIP signaling, rather than a vendor-specific proprietary protocol. The award is an acknowledgment of Teo’s leadership in this area.

“Other previously approved end instruments met DoD network security requirements and operational requirements, such as Multilevel Precedence and Preemption (MLPP), but were based on proprietary signaling from vendors such as Cisco (News - Alert) or Avaya (News - Alert),” Hill said. “These proprietary end instruments are not cross-platform deployable and are not based on industry standards. Similar to the commercial world, the DoD is moving away from being locked into single-vendor proprietary implementations and toward standards-based systems that allow more competitive solutions and universal cross-platform deployment. Teo phones are the first DoD-approved generic end instruments that meet this goal.”

According to a release from the company, Teo's UCR 2013 certification is the culmination of years of development and testing to meet the DoD Unified Capabilities Requirements for approved product listing . The DoD requirement was established to maintain a single consolidated list of products that have completed Interoperability and Information Assurance certification.

“Teo is proud to be a part of this important DoD milestone toward deploying a global communications network that supports multi-vendor interoperability,” Hill said. “Teo shares DoD's goal of establishing effective, secure, and common standards-based UC, and is pleased to have received this landmark approval after years of development and testing.”