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VoIP peering – the interconnection of separately administered IP networks for the mutual gain of service providers and their customers – is exploding, as evidenced by three major announcements made yesterday by companies operating in the VoIP peering space.

Yesterday morning, XConnect, one the largest providers of “Plug and Peer” VoIP federation-based interconnection services, announced that it had acquired IPeerX, a leading VoIP peering company owned by Pulver.com Enterprises, for an undisclosed sum.

XConnect’s acquisition of IPeerX, a Pulver-seeded company with more than 130 VoIP service providers, brings its total number of service provider customers to more than 300 – many of them in the Netherlands. In addition, it significantly increases the size of XConnect’s ENUM registry – which was also recently fortified when the company acquired e164.info, a Germany-based Carrier ENUM Exchange. According to a press release, the two acquisitions have added more than eight million active VoIP numbers to the XConnect’s ENUM registry, as well as 120 million numbers registered for future use.

Perhaps more importantly, the deal enables XConnect to take on even more VoIP service providers, which adds value to the both the company and the service. As VoIP peering goes, the more service providers and users you have connecting to your peering network, the more everyone stands to gain.

“VoIP operators are recognizing that peering has tremendous benefits and are leveraging the multi-lateral federation services of XConnect to enhance their features and lower their costs,” said Eli Katz, CEO of XConnect, in the press release. “With the acquisition of IPeerX, and the growth of our ENUM registry, we can extend our secure peering services to larger groups of operators. In creating the definitive global ENUM registry, XConnect enables the development of innovative IP services and delivers new revenue opportunities for service providers, while significantly reducing the costs of interconnections. This deal is a win-win for the customers of both companies and the VoIP Industry as a whole.”

IPeerX, which exchanges VoIP traffic based on multiple protocols (including SIP and H.323), was formed from the approximately 100 VoIP companies that peer with Free World Dialup, a pioneering Internet communications company established by pulver.com in the mid-1990s. According to the press release, Jeff Pulver, founder and CEO of Pulver.com Enterprises, will become a member of the XConnect advisory board, and Kingsley Hill, president of IPeerX, will head the company’s strategic federation development activities.

For more information and analysis of XConnect’s acquisition of IPeerX, be sure to check out Rich Tehrani’s article from yesterday morning.

In a second major announcement, Nextone and NeuStar said yesterday that they are partnering to create a turnkey VoIP peering solution called ServiceReady.

The ServiceReady solution was essentially created through NexTone’s certification of NeuStar’s SIP-IX IP exchange service, which is still in the trial stage. The certification means SIP-IX is fully interoperable with NexTone’s IntelliConnect System for VoIP peering. Integrating the two will enable VoIP network operators to peer with one another seamlessly and securely at leading Internet Exchange Providers (IXP) allied with NeuStar, including the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), Equinix (News - Alert), the Hong Kong Internet Exchange (HKIX), and TELEHOUSE. It also gives service providers a secure, scalable way to expand their network capabilities and accelerate VoIP revenues with granular control over service policy, billing and quality.

The goal of ServiceReady, as the name implies, is to give providers a simple and easy-to-deploy turnkey solution for peering VoIP traffic. Service providers and enterprises deploying NexTone products and NeuStar services will be able to originate, terminate, and share calls or sessions for mobile, fixed, and broadband communications.

The two companies will now work together in the areas of service definition, support training, sales collateral, and release management.

“The NexTone IntelliConnect System will give NeuStar customers a flexible, reliable, and secure way to interconnect with the SIP-IX service,” a press release states. “The NexTone system provides trusted ENUM connectivity to the SIP-IX service to find off-net partners. Regardless of the call destination, the NexTone system will deliver seamless service connectivity using any-to-any SIP and H.323 session signaling and on-demand media adaptation to ensure the session maintains the highest quality.”

The IntelliConnect System also provides dynamic policy enforcement capabilities, using NexTone’s unique Dynamic Policy Management (DPM) technology, enabling service partners to automatically manage changes in service quality, capacity, and availability across peering partners. The system also employs advanced session routing policies enabling service providers to route traffic between multiple peering partners using a blend of least cost, best quality, and most profitable routing. Security policies, with Call Admission Control enforcement, and topology hiding protect the integrity of all partner networks and prevent Denial of Service attacks and service theft. The system also provides NeuStar with real-time session detail records and on-demand reporting, for granular troubleshooting and diagnostics.

“When it comes to IP Services interoperability, voice peering is really just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dennis Brouwer, senior director of IP Exchange Services, NeuStar, in the press release. “By working together to create a ServiceReady solution, NexTone and NeuStar have laid the groundwork for the proliferation of services and business models that rely on seamless interconnection, global infrastructure, and access to a trusted, neutral registry of routing information.”

Also indicating an increased uptake for VoIP peering was Arbinet’s announcement yesterday that it had recently signed on 11 new service providers representing a total of 22 million customers. Operators joining Arbinet (News - Alert) include Columbus Communications Jamaica, nexVortex, Orbitel, Telecom Argentina (News - Alert), Telefonica Argentina, Telefonica Chile, Telefonica Peru, Telmex Chile and Verizon (News - Alert) Dominicana. Now, these providers can all peer with each other, as well as Arbinet’s existing customers, thus enabling them to bypass the PSTN and avoid costly interconnection fees.

Arbinet claims its peering solution is unique in that it queries all calls in a market against a SPIDER Registry-supported transaction server and sends calls destined for the customers of a participating operator directly to it with a settlement payment.

“This direct routing of calls from the originator to the end user customer reduces latency and improves quality for the buying member and creates a new revenue stream for the terminating operator,” a press release from Arbinet states. “For many calls, the operator receives the incoming international termination rate rather than the local in-country interconnect rate. A participant in Arbinet’s global peering community simply connects through a TDM or VoIP interface and Arbinet acts as the hub through which other providers can reach its customers.”

Steve Heap, CTO of Arbinet, said the company’s solution lets providers peer with one another “without the complexities of signaling and protocol conversion and international settlement.”

“As each new member of the community joins [our peering fabric], all existing members immediately and automatically begin peering with that new member, resulting in enhanced revenue for the sellers and higher quality for the buyer,” Heap said. “This is a major step forward in worldwide peering.”

In addition, Arbinet’s exchange converts traffic from VoIP to TDM as needed, thus enabling carriers to reach the operator without the need for VoIP conversion equipment. This also allows Arbinet’s members migrate from TDM to VoIP as gradually as they wish, without impacting other partners.

In addition to greatly reduced costs for transit, VoIP peering offers many other benefits, including increased capacity for extremely large amounts of traffic (i.e. the ability to distribute traffic across many networks); better control over traffic routing; improved signal quality; and better security.

And as more peering exchange points are established all over the world, the results will only get better – which in turn will help drive consumer and enterprise adoption of VoIP.


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Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for TMCnet and a columnist covering the telecom industry. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.