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XConnect Now Enables Carrier Business Processes

By Gary Kim, Contributing Editor

Larger service providers have had questions about VoIP peering federations for reasons having little to do with interconnection and exchanging traffic. Large carriers participate in an elaborate and extensive set of business relationships that provide real financial benefit, and they aren’t anxious to opt out of those programs. So the ability to interconnect and exchange traffic through a ” peering” federation has been relatively unattractive if it requires a change of business logic.

 

XConnect (News - Alert) hopes to overcome that objection by a new Global Alliance program that allows carriers to maintain their preferred business logic even while interconnecting through a VoIP peering fabric.

 

That sort of capability means "peering" operations, in a technical sense, will more closely resemble the business processes larger carriers prefer.

 

The new features allowing members to interconnect with partners they select under the settlement and policy terms they choose. The new features provide policy controls allowing members to create and manage federations, exchanging voice and multimedia traffic only with peering partners they select.

 

Settlement and settlement-free options and technical policies are supported. Members can identify and select interconnection partners, as well as provide access to real-time Quality of Service (QoS) details and advanced reporting through a Web portal.

 

Those features also will allow members to develop new revenue streams based on video and high-definition voice services requiring more quality of service control and use of presence information.

 

“The new Global Alliance will simplify our interconnection process; reduce our transit charges; and enable us to introduce new, rich multi-modal, real-time communications services, such as our video phone calling with HD voice," says Alan Duric (News - Alert), Telio CEO.

 

The "Private Alliance" option allows service providers to create or join peering communities with a subset of other Global Alliance members. The members will make their own policies regarding settlement, ENUM data sharing, types of traffic exchanged, and signaling and media security settings.

 

The "Global Alliance Community Web portal" contains the tools for finding peering partners based on their location, business type and service features supported, and creating and controlling all aspects of their peering policy on a peer-by-peer basis. The portal also offers access to real-time traffic statistics, market intelligence, forums, member messaging and networking tools.

 

The "Free Alliance" option allows service providers to exchange voice and multimedia traffic settlement-free, thereby extending the benefits of on-net calling to millions of IP end users worldwide.

 

The "Alliance In and Out" feature allows Global Alliance members to earn revenue by receiving inbound traffic from the PSTN into their networks.

 

 "Web 2.0 and Voice over Instant Messaging (VoIM) Peering" allows service providers to extend subscribers’ free-call reach by peering with IM communities, such as Google (News - Alert) Talk.

 

The new capabilities address key concerns larger carriers tend to have about joining peering federations.

Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jessica Kostek