Touting the success of its new alliance for next-generation telecom services, IP peering provider XConnect said that nine U.S. VoIP service providers are participating in the free trial of its HD voice federation.
Launched on April 1, the trial is designed to help speed adoption of high-definition voice services, which are seen as the next major step for VoIP and which require end-to-end IP connections, bypassing the legacy PSTN.
Xconnect's all-IP Interconnect 2.0 platform is "ideally suited for providing a scalable method for interconnection of HD and multimedia services on a cross-network basis," XConnect CEO Eli Katz said in a statement.
Providers taking part in the trial include Alteva, Broadvox, Phone.com, SimpleSignal, and Telesphere. The trial will run through June.
While major carriers are content to focus on their existing revenue-generation lines of business, creating industry coalitions and consortia has become the favored way of pushing adoption of new IP-based technology and services by competitive providers. Earlier this month Broadvox said it will launch the Enterprise Voice Exchange (EVX), a peering community for free SIP calling, later this year. Broadvox CEO Andre Temnorod told PHONE+ that his company plans to offer free SIP calling to subscribers within the EVX community and through federations, including XConnect.
With end-to-end IP bridges between “islands” of VoIP service becoming a critical goal for competitive service providers, Alteva and SimpleSignal earlier this year established a peering relationship that allows callers to interconnect over their networks without traversing the legacy PSTN. Sprung from discussions at the first CTO Summit, held at the VON Conference & Expo in Miami in September, the Alteva-Simple Signal relationship was the first of its kind between VoIP providers.
Operating within XConnect’s Global Alliance, the HD Alliance combines carrier ENUM-registry and multimedia IP interconnection hub services.
