Voice Peering Drivers and Strategies: 7-Part Video

Gary Kim, Editor-in-Chief, IP Business
Carlos Da Silva, Americas Marketing Director, France Telecom
Paul A. Woelk, Sr Manager, Access Strategy, Sprint
Heather Olson, Regional Manager, Telecom Italia Sparkle
Rodrigue Ullens, Co-founder & CEO, Voxbone

click "Related Article" at the bottom of this post to launch the first video segment. Also, if you have the bandwidth, select "Watch in HD." It's better.

Voice Peering: New Directions?

We might disagree about why the change is occurring, but it does seem that discussions of "voice peering" are moving in a different direction. Early on, there might have been more emphasis on how electronic numbering or native IP interconnection could save providers money, disintermediate legacy carriers or disrupt the voice business. If recent discussions are any indicator, there now is much more emphasis on solving basic interconnection tasks in a world of IP traffic, as well as creating a platform for introducing new services.

That isn't to say all peering supporters dismiss advantages of the disintermediating sort. There is no question but that cable companies as an industry segment are anxious to avoid interconnection payments to telephone companies whenever possible, as GSM-based mobile carriers likewise are interested in avoiding transit costs where possible.

The point is that there is a new practicality about the issues. Arbinet CTO Steve Heap, for example, points out that "peering is interconnection between two or more service providers to preserve quality, lower costs and create new services." In fact, Heap points to new problems created by number porting as a mundane but important problem peering can address. "In the Belgian market, for example, 18 percent of mobile numbers are ported," Heap notes.

And since every operator has different termination rates, peering can help service providers determine what the settlement rate ought to be when a mobile call is terminated, where to send a call and make those sorts of decisions in real time. Peering can also help with the time-consuming but relatively mundane issues of negotiating termination agreements with hundreds of discrete carriers. "Not every carrier has a relationship with every mobile operator, so maybe you want to route to provider who does have a relationship," says Heap.

One measure of how the discussion is changed is that a major service provider such as Tata views peering as a simple matter of ensuring call quality under conditions of increased routing complexity. "It isn't just about free calling," says Christian Michaud, Tata SVP.

In fact, routing complexity now appears to be a problem in its own right. "There are more choices of endpoints in the IP world," says Georges Smine, Nomin um senior director. There also are codec transcoding issues that will grow as more voice traffic shifts to IP origination.

In a business increasingly using IP transmission, "what we actually deliver changes as well," says Sarina Tu, Telcordia senior director. "These days, you really don't know where to send a call, what the class and quality of service are supposed to be or what the business relationship is between the originating and terminating networks."

Then there is a growing class of "presence" information that has to be exchanged, not simply the bearer traffic and signaling.

Then there's the matter of supporting all sorts of new services and applications over discrete physical networks, says Shrihari Pandit, Stealth Communications CEO. In many cases there will be advantages to terminating traffic without touching the public switched telephone network, especially when some features simply cannot be passed between networks based on PSTN switches.

The general notion of application-aware networks also applies to voice communications. "Types of calls are more diverse" and peering fabrics can provide the intelligence to support that diversity, Smine argues.

"Who can access and control your information and preferences," Tu asks, especially when that information might be scattered among any number of discrete databases?

"Who would be the central repository for the various databases?" asks Heap. "What do you do about conflicting returns if multiple databases provide different results when a query is made?"

"Service providers want all routing information processed internally, not by a third party," says Heap. "The issue is how all that information gets there."

Nor "do we want to create a new monopoly," Michaud adds.

Technological Determinism, VoIP and Video

Time Warner Cable once pondered offering a network-based digital video recorder service called "Mystro." Time Warner decided against introducing the service after legal threats from the broadcast industry. Cablevision Systems Corp. also tried to introduce a similar service before running into a content industry buzz saw.

Comcast now is testing a less-ambitious service like the "Start Over" service Time Warner now offers, allowing users to start a program at the beginning in case they missed the start.

At a recent industry meeting, a question arose: Where is the logical place to put such technology? Should it be in a consumer, edge of the network device or "in the cloud"? From a pure technology perspective, one might reasonably argue such functionality should be "in the network."

Of course, that is a technology answer. The problem is that rights holders fear such a move would damage their control over content and ad revenue attached to that content. In principle, one could strip out the original advertising inserted into a "live" stream and replace it with other advertising sold by the network distributor, not the program originator.

In similar fashion, another question arose at a separate "voice peering" panel about why proponents were spending so much time focusing on voice peering rather than other sorts of application peering or bandwidth.

Legitimate questions both. There is a place where advanced technology intersects with copyright law, national or local taxation regimes, rights of way issues, consumer protection laws and conflicting bodies of law governing voice communications, radio, TV, newspapers and data communications.

Technology enables us to cross many of those old boundaries. What technology does not allow us to do is transcend the legal, regulatory and tax laws that come attached to services, applications and activities. And that is the rub.

There are many things we can do. There are many things we want to do. The problem is that some of these things can only be done in certain ways without running afoul of laws, regulations or business models built on the existence of those rules.

It gets us only so far to say the rules increasingly are illogical in a genuine sense. Some of the rules might change over time. Others might simply have to be endured. The point is that simple logic and technological capability sometimes do not trump legacy ways of doing things.