Sipura Technology

» see sipura.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Internet calling in 2003 had a hardware problem that nobody wanted to talk about. The software worked and the bandwidth was arriving, but almost nobody wanted to make phone calls sitting at a computer wearing a headset. What people wanted was to pick up the phone already in the house. Sipura Technology was founded in San Jose in March 2003 to sell the part that made that possible, a plain analog telephone adapter with an Ethernet socket on one side and standard telephone jacks on the other.

The first product was the SPA-2000, which took two ordinary phones or fax machines and put them on a network, and the SPA-2100 was the same thing with a router inside it. Then came the SPA-3000, which is the one people remember, because it had an FXS port for your handset and an FXO port for the actual copper line coming into the building, so a single box could route a call out over the internet or out over the telephone network depending on what you told it to do. That was a strange and useful thing to own in 2004.

Sipura was never really a consumer brand. It sold to the service providers and the resellers who put their own name on the calling plan, and the largest of those relationships was with Linksys, whose voice-over-IP products ran on Sipura's technology. On 26 April 2005, Cisco announced a definitive agreement to buy the company outright for approximately $68 million in cash and options. It was the first acquisition Cisco ever made for its Linksys division, and it expected to close before its fiscal year ended on 30 July that summer.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the little white box ~

Cisco's own announcement cited a market research estimate that close to eight million households worldwide were making calls over their broadband connections in 2005, and that is the market Sipura had been quietly supplying from underneath. The company also built IP desk phones, the SPA-901 and the four-line SPA-941 among them, but the adapters were the volume product and the reason anybody bought the company.

What Cisco actually got was a team. The press release says so almost explicitly: the experienced people with voice expertise would help Linksys build internal research and development in voice and video, a capability the router division did not have. Two years of a startup's existence turned into an engineering group, and the Sipura name came off the boxes.

~ the part numbers outlived it ~

The hardware itself went on selling under other names. Linksys kept shipping SPA equipment, and when Cisco later sold Linksys it held on to the rights and carried the same line under Cisco Small Business for years afterward. In 2016 it launched the 7800 and 8800 IP phones, with 3PCC models running firmware descended from what Sipura had written. The letters SPA were short for Sipura Phone Adapter, and they stayed on Cisco price lists for more than ten years after the company behind them stopped existing.

I came to voice over IP from the wrong side of it. Dial-up in Turkey through the late nineties and TTNet broadband from around 2006 meant that when internet calling finally became normal for me it arrived as software on a computer, Skype and then whatever replaced Skype, never as a box between the wall socket and a handset. The whole premise of the Sipura adapter was a household with a landline it was already paying too much to use, and a reason to keep that handset while routing the call somewhere cheaper. Plenty of people had exactly that. The box found them through their provider rather than through a shop, which is why a company that mattered this much left so little trace in anyone's memory. sipura.com has no DNS record left behind it.

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