The PSTN: Major Block to Innovation

IT EXPO — I spent Wednesday at IT EXPO in a series of meetings with vendors and service providers, of various types, and every conversation found its way to a common theme: the PSTN and the limitations it places on next-generation telephony services.

A semi-random sampling of comments:

From Rich Buchanan, of home VoIP appliance maker ooma, which would like to offer its users HD voice: “For the process of getting packets onto the backhaul, what we’ve got is perfectly adequate. On the public leg there’s all sorts of problems, you’ve only got 3-percent packet-loss tolerance.”

From Rod Ullens, CEO of Voxbone, which has created the “iNum” system of universal international (non-country-specific) phone numbers with the prefix 883: “One of the advantages [of iNum] is that it enables full IP-to-IP communications between one service provider to another, with Voxbone in the middle, without going over legacy networks.”

From David Schwartz, CTO of XConnect, which is building a business around members-only “peering federations” that allow service providers to exchange traffic without paying settlement fees: “We started with IP-to-IP interconnection several years ago – we were saying this before anyone was aware that it’s a problem.”

They’re aware now. Based on my conversations here – and the planning meetings for the CTO Summit, at which we plan to plan an all-IP peering fabric that will serve as an alternative to the PSTN – it’s safe to say that the carrier-controlled PSTN is the single biggest obstacle to the wide spread of next-generation telecom services.

At the VON Conference & Expo, Sept. 21-23, in Miami Beach, we’ll have a session entitled “The Peering Puzzle: VoIP Interconnections and Peering in a Distributed-Network World” that will examine the problems with the current system – and some possible solutions.