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Among the announcements flowing out of Verizon (News - Alert) Business in June was one tidbit buried in a Unified Communication release that provides the foundation for the company to provide full-blown HD voice support by the end of the year.

Verizon announced VoIP IP Enterprise Routing or VIPER; I would have picked a different name because VIPER sound a lot like Cisco's (News - Alert) VIPR protocol and I'm sure there will be some confusion among the tech set when you start mixing up VoIP and IP interoperability and VIPER/VIPR. Maybe a better term would for what is going on is Pure SIP Routing (PSR) because Verizon is simply routing enterprise VoIP calls in an all-IP fashion without touching the PSTN.

VIPER is being offered to enterprises as an opt-in cost-saving feature where business-to-business VOIP calls on the Verizon Business (News - Alert) network are directly routed via SIP, eliminating domestic and international per-minute calling charges. In addition, customers using Verizon IP audio conferencing will not incur per-minute charges from any VIPER-enabled (i.e. SIP-trunked) location dialing into the host conference bridge.

If you already have a Verizon Business VoIP service such as IP trunking and hosted IP Centrex, the VIPER feature is available at no charge and does not require any additional customer hardware or software. On-line reporting provides tracking of which calls are 'on net' for VIPER and therefore free.

However, the most interesting feature of VIPER is that it is all SIP, all the time. Current codecs supported by VIPER are G.711 and G.729a. When asked, a Verzion product marketing manager said that G.722 isn't support 'at the moment' but it is 'in our queue' for technical certification and expected to be available by the end of the year.

You see where this is going, right? All those AudioCodes, Avaya, Cisco, Polycom (News - Alert) and all the other IP handset manufactures who have already 'baked in' G.722 and HD voice support into their phones will finally have a major service provider supporting the technology. It's going to be fun at IT EXPO in October to hear what the HD handset vendors have to say about this forthcoming event. 

SIP interconnectivity between service providers is still one of those open question marks. The Verizon product manager I spoke to said that interconnectivity is 'certainly where the market is going' and 'something we're looking at,' but it isn't something Verizon is doing today. I suspect that SIP peering between service providers will end up looking a lot like how regular peering on the Internet occurs today, with larger providers simply agreeing to peer with each other while smaller providers will have to pay for peering/transit as they do today.