VoIP Peering a Healthy Alternative for FHS

Originally published in FATPIPE magazine, April 2006.

Editor's Note: This new "VoIPeer Me" series follows in the footsteps of FAT PIPE's "Meet Me" series, which identified key carrier hotel interconnection points in North America and the Ethernet and VoIP network operators within them. This new series will demonstrate the marriage of Ethernet and VoIP through actual VoIP peering implementations of network operators within the carrier hotels. Our purpose is to show that VoIP peering currently exist and is working, who provides it, who uses it and how.

There are various methods and benefits of VoIP peering for different types of networks. We will attempt to identify as many of them as possible.

Enterprise VoIP peering is here, and it works. This revolution is well underway, and the good word is being spread. One of the best parts about it is that the benefits are not exclusive to any one type of enterprise VoIP network; they apply universally. It's all a matter of knowing who is doing what and how they did it. Not that everyone has the same legacy PBXs (private branch exchanges) or key systems, but a beaten path is a good start to building a solid road.

Freedom Health Systems (FHS) is a technology company based in Deerfield Beach, Fla. Among other things, they build networks to carry electronic health records and other data, aiming to reduce operating expenses across the board in health care. This helps organizations better manage their own internal processes but also enables them to interface with other organizations for information exchange. FHS's products and services are geared toward the health care industry with specific focus on hospitals, community health centers, ambulatory care centers, pharmacies and physician practices.

FHS enters into agreements with these entities to connect systems in various metropolitan and rural areas. This process frequently includes upgrading or adding new network links. To add value to their service offering, FHS began to include a voice networking option. "We go in and replace their phones and PBXs. We become their voice service provider," states Will Glynn of FHS. "It ends up saving them a lot of money."

Two of the factors that led to the inclusion of voice were the move to IP networking for the other data elements and the high termination costs that their customers were paying. It was a natural fit.

The FHS telecom network offering is comprised of IP phones and a custom VoIP platform. Cisco phones are used in all of the customer locations, except for one that uses an Asterisk as a TDM (time division multiplex) bridge in conjunction with an Avaya PBX. The sites are typically networked together with point-to-point circuits, usually T-1, creating a private IP network.

In addition to the VoIP component of the FHS business model, FHS uses VoIP between its own sites. It sets up private VoIP peering links between sites using point-to-point circuits for the main locations, and only in one remote site does it have a public Internet connection.

The combination of its customer-private VoIP WANs (wide area networks), as well as its own VoIP network, created an opportunity to establish a direct relationship with a wholesale VoIP carrier for better terminating rates. The search for a provider and the best place to connect are what led FHS to The Voice Peering Fabric.

"VoIP peering was a natural add-on because we were building a private IP network already," explains Glynn. "The primary reason for our VPF interconnection was quality. Our experience with voice over the public Internet was not good. This is also why we use point-to-point circuits in the networks. All too often we would get a support ticket from our control center and learn that some ISP (Internet service provider) hand-off across the country went down and took a call center with it."

Beyond the high-quality, private IP network of the VPF is the marketplace itself and the benefits of provisioning VLANs (virtual local area networks) instead of local loops. The VPF Minutes Market gives FHS access to multiple providers of high-quality routes at wholesale rates. If and when it would need to change or add a new provider, all that is necessary is the contract, and then a VLAN is provisioned across the Fabric, saving time and money. Beyond the bilateral minutes relationships FHS establishes on the VPF, it also uses the VPF ENUM (electronic numbering) Registry, but as Glynn points out, "ENUM was a bonus for us. Our main concern was quality." Given that, the savings they realized were substantial.

Getting connected to the VPF was straightforward for FHS. Its VoIP platform is located in a data center facility at the New World Tower carrier hotel in Miami. From there, Progress Telecom (now part of Level 3 Communications) provides FHS with an Ethernet circuit into the VPF. Ethernet providers now have a newfound destination on their transport networks for enterprise customers: the VPF node at the local carrier hotel.

From this case study it is clear that there are different dimensions to enterprise VoIP peering. In some instances the peering may occur internally and also potentially between customers' networks. It is possible to envision a community of enterprises and their respective information technology and management information system directors creating a VoIP Peering coordinators group. The purpose would be to build towards a common network interconnection point with the goal of making their calls (and other data) on-net. The reasons for that would probably be very similar to those stated by FHS, including quality, choice, flexibility and cost.

It certainly looks like we're all moving in that logical direction.

Hunter Newby was chief strategy officer of telx at the time of this publishing.

*One office still uses a legacy switch. However, the rest of the operation including clients is IP-to-IP.

Note: Contact information is from the original April 2006 publication.

Originally published in FATPIPE magazine, April 2006 issue.

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