Interconnecting VoIP: What It Takes

As IP continues to evolve into the de facto protocol of choice for voice, the need for interoperable IP peering between service provider networks to efficiently carry that traffic has become more and more critical. Today’s panel, “Deploying VoIP Interconnection Between Networks” will address the technological issues and the business models at play.

Session leader Rich Fruchterman, public policy and regulatory counsel at NeuStar Inc. will be joined by Tim Cody, NeuStar’s director of product management for IP exchange services, and Todd Lechtenberg, vice president at service provider PAETEC, which handles a large amount of VoIP traffic.

VoIP peering ideally means the efficient exchange of interconnect address information between trusted service providers and VoIP communities; neutral third-parties can act as the intermediaries between networks by leveraging database and registry capabilities for authorization and to feed information to other back-office functionalities for efficient routing and provisioning.

However, a common approach to VoIP peering has been a long time coming; several companies in the business of peering registry, like NeuStar, began by building their own databases, which did not mesh well with the databases of others. But while having a dominant player in that business does deliver economies of scale to service providers, VoIP ubiquity has meant that this isn’t enough. For a truly global and efficient traffic flow, interconnection must become standardized and interoperable across third-party peering providers.

The panel will offer methods for achieving that, including technical details like how to share routing information among interconnection partners, codecs and sampling, the bearer path baseline, interop baselines, provisioning softswitches and security issues at the edge. It also will cover how to ensure that the user experience remains consistent and of a high quality.

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