More and more Americans are looking for cheaper alternatives to the often expensive home phone line. Many are turning instead to VoIP technologies, and one of the best known providers of residential VoIP tech is Ooma. But as Ooma grew, it began to notice that its calls were not always routed through the lowest cost carrier. In order to address this need, the company turned to least cost routing solutions provider TransNexus (News - Alert).

Tony Farrand, vice president of engineering and operations at Ooma, explained the company’s dilemma, stating, “We would route a call to one of our ITSPs who advertised the lowest rate to a particular exchange, but we would often find that the target phone number had moved to another carrier, so our ITSP would not honor its advertised rate.”

One solution was to route calls based on the local routing number (LRN) instead of the dialed telephone number. Normally, this would require SIP service providers to query the U.S. Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC) for each outgoing call, but this would add expense and require dependence on an external network resource. But fortunately, TransNexus had a better approach.

Using the TransNexus Routing, Operations and Billing Support System (ROBSS) gave Ooma a simple, low-cost solution for complete VoIP network management. Combining the OSPrey routing server and the NexOSS Web interface, the solution allows Ooma to host the NPAC database within its own network, keeping its server automatically synchronized with the NPAC, ensuring that their routing is based on near real-time LRN data. This is unique amongst number portability solutions.

To use the simple ROBSS system, operators merely use NexOSS to provision routes, rates and number translation rules to create a least cost routing table. Then, NexOSS pushes this table to the OSPrey routing server, and when an Ooma customer makes a call, the network queries the OSPrey server, which then uses the local NPAC database and the LCR table to return the least cost route.

To find out more about TRANSNEXUS, visit the company at ITEXPO West 2012. To be held Oct. 2-5 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX, ITEXPO (News - Alert) is the world’s largest communications and technology event . Visit TransNexus in booth # 819. For more information on ITEXPO West 2012, click here.