Next-Gen Interconnection

CLECs Voice Concerns about Interfacing with ILEC Networks in Age of IP

The network’s evolution to its all-packet future, however, is at an important inflection point: In order to reach its full potential, the managed-packet networks of different carriers must interconnect and exchange voice traffic, just as legacy circuit-switched networks do today.

To be clear, managed-packet carrier networks do not use the public Internet, where packets move on a “best-efforts” basis. Rather, managed-packet networks deliberately are designed by carriers to identify and route voice packets using specific protocols and routing instructions to meet the real-time needs of voice service. In this way, managed-packet networks avoid the issues of quality and security that limit the usefulness of the public Internet to provide reliable voice service.

The first stage of deployment of managed-packet voice networks occurred in the form of isolated islands in which individual carriers designed networks to ensure within-network QoS for their voice products. With most subscribers still served by an incumbent, these new managed-packet networks have to “downshift” (or, more colloquially, “dumb down”) to older, legacy circuit-switched technology at the network edge as a condition of exchanging voice traffic with the ILEC.

But requiring a managed-packet network to “downshift” to circuit-switched form merely to interconnect — particularly where the incumbent itself has deployed a managed-packet transport network — increases cost, reduces quality and discourages the wider deployment of next-generation networks and applications. Investment dollars should be spent on expanding managed-packet networks, not on delaying the transition away from legacy circuit-switched network.

The ILECs are deploying managed-packet technology in their transport networks, and the existing use of legacy circuit-switched interconnection need not continue where they have done so. The typical ILEC transport network already is moving rapidly to managed-packet technology because this reduces the ILECs’ capital and operating costs (just as it does for other carriers).

Moreover, as time goes on, a greater and greater number of the ILECs’ own end users will subscribe to managed-packet services (such as Verizon’s FiOS service), extending the benefits of managed-packet interconnection deeper in the network all the way to the subscriber’s premises itself. At that point, there will be even more harm — in cost inefficiency and service degradation — if other carriers cannot routinely exchange voice traffic with the ILECs on a managed-packet basis.

The technical parameters and business rules for the exchange of voice traffic between traditional circuit-switched networks are well-established, but did not become so without controversy and oversight. To the contrary, history has shown that establishing fair interconnection and traffic-exchange agreements frequently has required intervention by regulatory authorities to arbitrate disputes and resolve differences.

Remarkably, some ILECs characterize continued regulatory oversight over managed-packet interconnection for the exchange of voice traffic as a “radical” concept, as though the mere substitution of managed-packet technology for a circuit-switched architecture will eliminate the potential for ILECs to attempt to impose unreasonable interconnection terms. Ideally, efficient traffic-exchange agreements can be reached through negotiation, but the real question is: What is the recourse should negotiations fail?

Preserving reliable and high-quality voice services — even as the nation’s networks continue to evolve into a packet architecture — must remain a critical public-policy goal. Voice service is the foundation of consumer and business telecommunications, and provides the basic premise of the nation’s commitment to Universal Service.

Quality voice service is uniquely important to our lives, security, social structure and our economy. As such, assuring the efficient interconnection of managed-packet networks is no less important to achieving quality voice service in the future than the interconnection of circuit-switched networks has been in the past.

The nation’s commitment to quality voice service is not limited to circuit-switched technology. The widespread emergence of managed-packet networks presages an all-packet future in which voice services commonly are provisioned in packet, and not circuit, form. This change in technology, however, does not lessen, at all, the need for efficient interconnection. Nor does the change in technology lessen the need for oversight, to ensure that any disputes are resolved quickly and efficiently.

Joseph Gillan is a consultant with Gillan Associates. He can be reached at joegillan@earthlink.net.

For more on the issue of interconnection, see our recent “Tackling Carrier Interconnection” Q&A with Dave Malfara president and CEO of Remi Communications, a six-year-old application network provider in the Northeast. Thirty-year industry veteran Malfara this month sits on a COMPTEL panel, which Joseph Gillan will moderate. An advance story on that COMPTEL panel, called “Next-Generation Interconnection – The Challenges Ahead,” also can be found online at www.xchangemag.com/addedinsight.

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