Private Peering Goes IP

Stock exchanges have been connecting phones direct at different trading companies for about 20 years, and now that trend of “private peering” has moved to the realm of IP.

“There’s no phone call, there’s no switch; it just happens,” says Hunter Newby, chief strategy officer at telx. “That’s peering, and that’s multilateral peering. Traditionally, that’s been circuit-switched, but it doesn’t matter. The whole purpose is just to be on-net with the other party” immediately and at no incremental cost.

telx’s Hunter Newby

This kind of enterprise peering now is expanding to encompass VoIP, data and other kinds of traffic, and it allows a variety of business-to-business partners to connect directly.

Thus, private VoIP peering is extending beyond service providers to include end users as well.

XConnect Global Networks Ltd. is among the outfits offering private, or strategic, peering federations. For example, the company offers peering for the Joint Cable Consortium in the Netherlands, a group of five cablecos that joined forces to expand their VoIP footprints. “Those cablecos set the terms for membership, but we charge them a fee to deliver that federation peering as a managed service,” says XConnect COO Natan Tiefenbrun. “Today, we bill them an annual fee, but settlement between the service providers is entirely between them.”

The consortium in the Netherlands is just an early example of VoIP private peering. Tiefenbrun says there are “a number of RFPs asking for private or strategic federations, but I can’t talk about them. We are involved in federations in two other countries and they are federations of pure-play ITSPs. We’re also in conversations with other providers to do peering between their own customers — one of the carriers wants to offer peering between their enterprise customers; this one is European.”

XConnect’s Tiefenbrun

The outbound calling that service providers can offer as a result of VoIP private peering makes the carrier’s service stickier, he says, and the inbound calling side of it offers a new revenue source for the service provider. That new revenue source is possible because the service provider can offer termination to the numbers they wouldn’t otherwise be able to offer termination to due to ENUM registry and VoIP peering, he says. With the PSTN, termination fees always go to the owner of the number, he adds.

Another company offering private peering is SITA, a provider of IT business solutions and communications services to the air transport industry. The company announced earlier this year that it has deployed NexTone Communications’ session management technology for the company’s Voice Exchange service.

SITA’s Voice Exchange enables its customers — which include airlines, aircraft manufacturers, airports, airport authorities, aerospace companies, and travel agents — to bypass the traditional PSTN; link islands of distributed locations together into one common service; significantly reduce the costs of intra- and interairline telephony costs; and integrate with existing SITA IP-based infrastructure and related services. And NexTone’s intelligent session border controller technology now will allow SITA to introduce new services such as voice VPNs and IP Centrex to its existing customer base.

“We needed a scalable solution that could integrate different protocols, while at the same time fix signaling variations for interoperability. NexTone’s MSX and RSM products not only meet these interoperability requirements, but further extend the overall quality of SITA’s voice and convergence services,” says Denis Berger, head of product line, SITA. “Today, members of the air transport industry can now call and be called on the Voice Exchange community without any per-minute charge. Calls can be made from any device, including IP phones (hardware), PC or PDA/smartphones, dual GSM/Wi-Fi mobile phones, or legacy PBX telephones.” Another company known for its private peering services is Global Crossing Ltd., which offers something it calls VoIP Community Peering, an enhancement to the company’s VoIP services. VoIP Community Peering creates an extranet community for enterprises and their various business partners — such as suppliers, manufacturers and distributors in a supply chain — that experience high call volumes. It delivers flat-rate intercarrier compensation, more predictable cost structure and higher operating margins on VoIP services. And it has no usage fees for calls terminating to DIDs/DDIs provisioned on Global Crossing VoIP local services.

The offering is unique in enabling these calls to include international call completion on the Global Crossing network, calls within company, and calls external to our customer’s network, according to the company.