VoIP Peering Round 2
January 1, 2007
by Hunter Newby
Hunter Newby was CEO of The Telx Group at the time of this publishing.
Editor's Note: The "VoIPeer Me" series demonstrates the marriage of Ethernet and VoIP through actual VoIP peering implementations of network operators within the carrier hotels. Its purpose is to show where VoIP peering currently exists, who provides it, who uses it and how.
It's fitting to wrap up everything around the start of a new year, so I'll take this time to wrap up the 2006 VoIPeer Me series. This past year has seen profiles of VoIP peering service users ranging from the obvious international wholesale minutes crowd to the not-so-obvious, but increasingly aware, enterprise network operators. Each have their respective motivations and desires when it comes to peering their VoIP traffic, but across the board they all share one common link: they all have made the move to VoIP Peering.
The 2006 VoIPeer Me Series acted as a reality check for this emerging market segment to determine who, if anyone, was implementing VoIP Peering services. The results were very promising, to say the least.
For some enterprises and carriers, the motivation was a bilateral trunk replacement of TDM (time division multiplex) for SIP (session initiation protocol). The business case was very straightforward: they already buy and/or sell minutes with one or more providers, and they wish to keep it that way, but they just want to lower the operating expense by cutting out circuit-switched minutes for packet-switched and DS-1s and DS-3s for Ethernet ports. That's fairly simple and not a lot to ask. And seeing how the average savings was 30 to 60 percent for those that implemented VoIP trunks earlier in the year, Christmas came early. The VoIP peering service providers that offered bilateral facilitation featured in 2006 included General Telecom, Interoute, The Voice Peering Fabric and X-Connect.
In comparison to the number of bilateral VoIP peering arrangements that were established during the year, there were fewer multilateral implementations. This is in part due to the fact that bilateral VoIP connections are really just an evolution for many, if not all, of these relationships that were already in place. Multilateral VoIP peering, on the other hand, is a very new concept. It involves the use of new routing/lookup functionality (ENUM in most cases, SRV in a few) and a new way to look at the exchange of voice traffic—that being a free exchange.
Multilateral voice is not for everyone. Those that still wish to bill per minute have not yet moved to this method and probably will not until they are absolutely forced to. For others it makes all the sense in the world. This is a trend that will only grow, and the economics dictate as much. The science of it is slightly more complicated than SIP trunking, to the extent of understanding DNS (domain name system), which for some may be challenging, but for most it is largely a function of what they do every day as it is. The VoIP peering providers that offered multilateral services featured in 2006 included The Voice Peering Fabric, VeriSign and X-Connect.
The range of VoIP peering services in use during the past year also has varied, which is a good sign that the market niche is not a one-trick pony and has dimensional revenue and sustainability.
Beyond the exchange of minutes, or on-net endpoints in the case of multilateral, there are the protocol conversion and meditation type services of VoIP peering. They include TDM to SIP conversion for those legacy folks that have not yet upgraded to full VoIP or would just rather outsource, and also other flavors of conversion including H.323 and even varying SIP version mediation.
Originally published in FATPIPE magazine, January 2007 issue.
