Reaching Milestones, IP Interconnections Take Shape

Looking forward into 2010 and beyond, it’s clear that, for competitive service providers and major carriers alike, solving what’s been called the “peering puzzle” has moved up to the top of the telecom priority list. As HD voice becomes more of a sought-after feature, and as VoIP providers become in many ways a new class of CLEC, finding ways to establish all-IP, end-to-end interconnections between different providers’ customer bases has become increasingly urgent.

“In general everybody is still talking around it,” said Dave Gilbert, CEO of Southern California-based VoIP provider SimpleSignal, “but nobody’s really gripping it yet.”

If only telecom looked like this.

That could change this year, as several recent developments point to a growing number of federations, alliances, and peering fabrics designed to connect providers and carriers, many of them bypassing the PSTN to provide all-IP connections via VPNs, MPLS, or other interconnect technologies.

That was the subject of last week’s Interconnection World Forum, in London. Bringing together operators from around the world – primarily from Europe – IWF is put on by the i3 Forum, an industry alliance formed in 2007 with the express mission of making it easier for carriers to migrate to next-generation, all-IP networks by promoting international interconnections. The i3 Forum now comprises 27 carriers in more than 100 countries, representing 80 percent of the world’s voice traffic.

The i3 Forum was one of the catalysts behind the agreement, announced at the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference in Honolulu last month, between Telecom Italia’s Sparkle unit and wholesale carrier iBasis to move their bilateral voice traffic to IP. Based on i3 Forum guidelines, the agreement marks the first full migration of international voice bilateral traffic to IP, the companies said.

“Telecom Italia has been on the forefront of deploying IP – they migrated their domestic traffic five years ago,” Paul Floyd, COO of iBasis, told VON. “They have a very strong belief in IP, and the efficiency gains it brings, as do we.”

HD Voice Forces the Issue

The TI-iBasis pairing follows a similar agreement between U.S. providers SimpleSignal and Alteva to set up a bilateral peering fabric through which the companies can exchange IP traffic without traversing the PSTN. Sprung from discussions at the first CTO Summit, held at the VON Conference & Expo in Miami last month, the Alteva-SimpleSignal relationship is the first of its kind between VoIP providers. It will allow users to make HD voice and video calls without the inevitable degradation that comes from having interconnections over the PSTN.

Helping to spur on the movement toward full interconnectivity are new high-definition voice initiatives from companies like TurboBridge, which offers a free, Web-based HD voice conferencing service over any VoIP connection, including Skype.