About SIP Train
Most VoIP training stops at the GUI. SIP Train starts at the packet capture and works up. Here's why we exist, who we're for, and what we promise.
There is one well-known online certification provider for SIP. It does a competent job at fundamentals. But anyone who works on a tier-1 carrier, a hosted PBX core, or a non-trivial SBC deployment quickly hits the ceiling of what vendor or vendor-aligned training will teach — because the deeper material lives in RFC 3261 §17, in RFC 3550 §6.4, in the corner cases of SIGTRAN M3UA failover, and in the SBCs' own internal logic, not in slide decks.
SIP Train was built to fill that gap with a serious, vendor-neutral curriculum that assumes the engineer reading it wants to understand the protocol — not just memorise a vendor's command syntax. Our positioning is simple:
SIP Train is built around three primary audiences:
Adjacent audiences include network engineers pivoting into voice, freelance VoIP consultants building credibility, and university and college instructors who want curriculum-grade material to teach from.
SIP Train was founded by Andrew Ward, principal at Award Consulting, an established UK-based telecoms engineering practice. Andrew has spent his career on the carrier side of voice — SS7/SIGTRAN, SBC architecture and operations, hosted PBX cores, UCaaS deployments, and the kinds of tickets where the answer lives in a packet capture rather than a knowledge-base article.
SIP Train is incorporated as a separate California LLC, with its own brand, billing, and operations — deliberately distinct from Award Consulting's services business. The two companies share Andrew's domain expertise; everything else is independent.
The platform has three deliberate design choices that distinguish it from the video-driven training market:
SIP is a text-based protocol; trying to teach it through 45-minute talking-head videos is fighting the medium. Lessons are written: annotated SIP messages, real PCAP excerpts, ladder diagrams, and field-level explanations you can search, copy and reference.
Every lesson page includes a tutor with full context of the lesson, your progress, and
the rest of the curriculum. Ask why a particular trace shows what it shows, or why
Contact differs between INVITE and REGISTER, and you get a protocol-level
answer, not a generic LLM response.
When errata appear or a BCP changes, the relevant lessons are updated within days, not within the next recording cycle. The platform is built so a tiny team can keep content current.
If you finish a SIP Train course and don't feel measurably more confident reading a trace, calling out an SBC implementation bug, or arguing about the right behaviour of a 2xx ACK on a whiteboard — tell us within 30 days and we'll refund you. We're building this for the long haul; we'd rather not have your money than have you tell other engineers we wasted your time.
Whether you're an individual engineer thinking about CVA, a team lead exploring team licensing, or an academic curriculum designer — we'd love to hear from you.
Get in touch