New VoIP Services Central to Future of Telecom Hotels

The new Any2 IP service announced by One Wilshire in Los Angeles, one of the premiere “telecom hotels” in the United States, is a prelude to many VoIP-centric services that the facility sees as the future of telecom interconnect sites.

One Wilshire, with its West Coast partner, the Market Post Tower in San Jose, Calif., launched the Any2 exchange as a free high-performance Internet packet exchange service. Any participant in Any2 IP can exchange traffic with other participants at 100mbps or 1gbps, using either copper or fiber.

“In five years or 10, what looks like a TDM world today will be a packet world. This is a way for us to test the packet-world here in California, so we will be creative in designing solutions that will meet the needs of that community.,” said John Savageau, senior vice president of operations at CRG West LLC, which manages One Wilshire. (CRG West is a wholly owned operating subsidiary of The Carlyle Group, and manages its telecom facilities, which include One Wilshire, Market Post Tower and a number of other telecom facilities.)

The facility now has about 220 tenants that offer VoIP services of some kind. “The next step for us at One Wilshire is to find a way to enhance the value of telephone and Internet connections and find some way to bring it all together,” said Savageau.

The Any2 IP service was launched initially, Savageau said, because “one thing that One Wilshire did not have was a good strategy looking to the future in a packet world. So we decided to put it up and offer it free to tenants as a utility switched-Ethernet service.” The service quickly attracted many VoIP users. “What started as a free Internet exchange has become a free VoIP exchange,” Savageau said.

Users include VPF (The Voice Peering Fabric), a VoIP-peering service of Stealth Communications Inc. at 60 Hudson St. in New York City; Google Inc.’s VoIP service; and CLECs, such as Pac-West Telecomm Inc. Overseas companies, such as China Netcom, now also use the service.

One Wilshire also has quietly created its own ENUM server, using Internet standards, “but we are reluctant to be aggressive because that may scare off people like The VPF or Arbinet,” said Savageau. Nevertheless, the homegrown One Wilshire ENUM registry has been tested to 50,000 requests per second.

Savageau said one role for One Wilshire may be to offer links between VoIP-peering services of companies such as VPF and VeriSign Inc. “Our ENUM is for those who may not have one. In the future we may act as a neutral clearinghouse for others’ ENUM services. That may be the niche that we can fill, to bring all these ENUM services together. But we have to make it work in a business sense.”

With the rapid growth in use of the IP exchange service, “We will probably have to eat some capex and extend the platform soon,” says Savageau. “Real traffic is on there, and we have to treat it as a high-quality, service-level-backed product.”

Enabling VoIP exchanges is just a first step for telecom hotels. As IP communication broadens from voice and e-mail, to highly portable multimedia devices, Savageau sees One Wilshire and its partners becoming “the center of the presence directories worldwide.” He is looking at technology “that allows me to have global presence directories interspersed around the world.”

Presence is a critical technology for the future, he says, because in a world moving to IP, phone numbers “are the crutch of those who cannot get out of the old central-office frame of mind. But the reality is that a phone number has nothing to do with where you are.”

The challenge is as much to deal with mindsets as technology. “Things have really changed, and some can’t handle that radical change. I am in a telecom company, and even people here can’t deal with it.”

Carlyle Group, The www.carlylegroup.com
China Netcom (China Network Communications Group Corp.) www.chinanetcom.com.cn
CRG West LLC www.crgwest.com
Google Inc. www.google.com
Pac-West Telecomm Inc. www.pacwest.com
Stealth Communications Inc. www.stealth.net
VeriSign Inc. www.verisign.com
VPF (The Voice Peering Fabric) www.thevpf.com

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