Stealth’s Voice Peering Fabric Sews Up IP Interconnectivity

It’s clear that the future of communications is IP. But as they move to IP networking, service providers must decide how they will exchange VoIP and other IP-based traffic with other service providers. Stealth Communications Inc. presented a solution for these service providers when it launched the Voice Peering Fabric (VPF), which this year is expected to process more than 100 billion minutes of VoIP traffic. New Telephony Executive Editor Paula Bernier recently spoke with Shrihari Pandit, president and CEO of Stealth Communications, about VPF and what it plans to address during the Voice Peering track it’s sponsoring at the COMPTEL Fall 2006 Convention & Expo Oct. 8 through 11 in Orlando, Fla.

NT: What is the Voice Peering Fabric?

SP: The Voice Peering Fabric is actually a service of Stealth. The Voice Peering Fabric is in essence a distributed, Layer 2 Ethernet fabric. And it’s designed as an exchange, or meet point, for service providers and enterprise customers to exchange voice over IP traffic in a secure, quality-of-service environment. It allows them to buy and sell incoming DID and outbound termination services on a wholesale basis. DID is basically if you need telephone numbers throughout the United States or around the world you buy that type of service. So that’s one part of the system.

And then we have other parts of our system that allow our members to buy and sell access to SS7 and TCAP (transaction capabilities application part, a protocol for SS7 networks) services from companies such as SNET DG, which is now part of AT&T [Inc.]; TNS [Transaction Network Services]; and VeriSign [Inc.]. We also have INFONXX that sells service on the system.

The other part of the system is we have the VPF ENUM registry and VPF SRV (service record) registry. Basically the ENUM and SRV registries, these are databases and they contain telephone numbers and e-mail addresses that are mapped to Internet addresses. What’s very important about this is it enables carriers and enterprise customers to be able to call each other directly for free in an effort to bypass the public telephone network. So some of the organizations that are part of that system are MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], Yale University, XO [Communications], RCN [Corp.], PAETEC [Communications Inc.], Net2Phone [Inc.], SunRocket [Inc.] -- and these companies, again, are using this system to send and receive calls to each other directly in an effort to reduce their operating expenses. It’s becoming very important now, especially in the telecom industry as companies start moving to flat-rate-type models. If they have fixed revenue coming in per subscriber, and they have variable costs on the back end, that’s very problematic for many service providers. So they look toward ENUM and SRV as a way to control their operating expenses.

NT: When was VPF established? Give us a little history.

SP: We launched the VPF back at the end of 2003. It only had one node in New York. And we had only six companies connected to it back then. I think of the six, the first two were China Telecom [Corp. Ltd.] and Net2Phone. Today we have over 100 organizations that are part of it. We have nodes in nine cities around the U.S. and in Europe, and it continues to expand in terms of new members coming on board. Talking about some of the new members we’re announcing at COMPTEL – we’re going to have SunRocket and PAETEC.

NT: What are the most popular VPF services?

SP: What’s happening in the service provider industry is not only do they want to reduce costs by using ENUM and SRV, but wholesale is a very big part of everyone’s business in the carrier space. So when they come onto the VPF they’re selling DID service, selling wholesale termination services to the footprints they have connectivity in. What we’re also seeing is service providers also typically have to send calls to outside their region, where they buy services from other telecom companies. They would traditionally have TDM connections. But what we’ve started seeing this year is a lot of them are transitioning away from TDM connections and moving to all-IP connections. So we’re seeing a lot of CLECs, PTTs and cable companies moving everything to IP trunks.

NT: What issues will the VPF address during its Voice Peering track at the COMPTEL Fall 2006 Convention & Expo?

SP: A lot of people have heard about voice peering, but still they don’t understand the different elements involved in voice peering. So we’re going to be talking about bilateral peering, where typically two organizations come together to negotiate an agreement. And then we’re going to talk about the new type of peering, which is called multilateral peering. Multilateral peering is basically the new foundation on how to accelerate voice over IP traffic – going from IP to IP, but also multilateral peering is the key technology that’s going to enable videoconferencing, multimedia streams to be fully integrated and even potentially integrating voice over IP with IPTV technology.

What we’re seeing right now is voice has moved into an application layer, so that means service providers will ultimately become ASPs at the end of the day. So these ASPs will need to peer with each other, and here’s the reason why. If you have a video phone and I have a video phone and we both want to make a video conferencing call, both of our service providers will have to peer with each other directly in order for the video stream to connect on my phone and your phone. So that’s where the VPF and the VPF ENUM and multilateral technology comes into play. If the service providers don’t peer together, none of these applications can work successfully. What will end up happening is, my video call will go through the PSTN and then go back to you, which will mean only the audio portion of the call will work – the video portion of the call will be dead in the water, so to speak.

Stealth Communications Inc. www.stealth.net

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