VON Exhibitors Still Largely Believe the V Stands for VoIP

VON – as in Jeff Pulver’s traditionally VoIP-focused event – used to stand for Voice on the Net. But, if you paid attention to the promotional materials for this month’s VON show in Boston, you noticed the V now stands for video.

While video is certainly a hot topic at this show, with keynotes and other panels designed around the subject, much of the exhibitor news out of the event remained squarely in the realm of VoIP. Among the VoIP trends presented at VON were announcements around VoIP peering, wireless VoIP and IMS.

On the VoIP peering front, NeuStar Inc., a leader in directories, announced seven new members to its Session Initiated Protocol Exchange (SIP-IX) alliance. Those new partners include a combination of service providers and vendors, and include Acme Packet, BroadSoft Inc., iBasis Inc., NexTone Communications, Sonus Networks Inc., Sylantro Systems and XO Communications Inc.

Previously announced partners include Equinix and Telehouse, and technology partners CEON Corp., JacobsRimell, Incognito and Nominum Inc. SIP-IX, which was launched nearly a year ago and is still considered in trial stage, allows IP communications providers to connect with one another directly.

In a similar vein, Arbinet-thexchange Inc. said 11 providers have joined its global peering community, which now includes 80 million numbers and 22 million customers. Those new additions include Columbus Communications Jamaica, nexVortex Inc., Orbitel, Telecom Argentina, Telefonica Argentina, Telefonica Chile, Telefonica Peru, Telmex Chile and Verizon Dominicana.

Arbinet's solution queries all calls in a market against a SPIDER Registry-supported transaction server and sends calls destined for the customers of a participating operator directly to it with a settlement payment. For many calls, the operator receives the incoming international termination rate rather than the local in-country interconnect rate.

Meanwhile, XConnect Global Networks Ltd. announced it has acquired IPeerX, Jeff Pulver’s VoIP peering company. With the acquisition, XConnect will bolster its global VoIP peering presence and significantly increase the size of its ENUM registry of VoIP numbers.

The acquisition of IPeerX comes on the heels of XConnect’s acquisition in May of e164.info, the Germany-based Carrier ENUM Exchange. This brings the total XConnect membership to approximately 300 service providers in 30 countries, together contributing more than 8 million active VoIP numbers to XConnect’s ENUM Registry as well as a further 120 million numbers registered for future use.

On the wireless VoIP front, NewStep Networks Inc. revealed it has deployed with its first major telephone carrier customer, without actually naming that customer. The vendor’s solution affords service providers the ability to switch calls between cell and wireline phones with a one-button transfer.

CTO Andre Moskal said the service provider, which initially targeted the feature at enterprise users, began deploying the NewStep technology in June and aims to deliver services based on that technology in all of its markets.

Sylantro Systems Corp. came out with enhancements to its Synergy application servers that allow wired and wireless phones to seamlessly interoperate to deliver business phone features, allowing carriers and network equipment vendors to fully integrate mobile handsets into business VoIP virtual PBX systems. “Synergy 4.1 provides mobile phones with the same capabilities as a full-featured desk phone,” explained Ron Raffensperger, senior vice president of marketing at Sylantro Systems. “Call forwarding, extension dialing, dialing restrictions, business administration of wireless features – these and other features can be delivered to the termination point of choice for a business user, whether they are working in the office, the car, or home. Sylantro’s technology will let people choose the way they want to work.”

On the consumer equipment front, a company called Truphone announced the availability of a free, beta, VoIP software download for Wi-Fi-enabled, mass market mobile handsets. The first download is for Nokia's latest E-series handsets, with the N-series handsets to follow imminently. Support for additional Wi-Fi-enabled phones, including those built on the Windows Mobile platform, is to follow. Calls between 'on net' Truphone handsets are free worldwide.

But because VoWi-Fi enabled handsets vary greatly in terms of performance, Azimuth Systems unveiled a test suite that enables service providers, handset providers and semiconductor vendors to streamline the testing of VoWi-Fi phones and converged wireless devices.

And in a tangential application, a company called VoxLib Corp. launched what it said is the first-ever voice IM mobile application for the mass market.

Users of the application will be able to use their mobile phones to make long-distance calls to PC users that subscribe to IP voice services such as Skype.

CEO Stephane Marceau explained that users can visit the VoxLib site to download the application software to their PCs. Then, when those same users call in to their SkypeIn number from a mobile phone, they are automatically recognized, and the application launches to enable them to call friends on their VoIP-enabled PCs. “It works with any of the 2.2 billion cell phones on the planet,” said Marceau, adding that a couple thousand Skype users have already preregistered for the application software. (For more on Mobile VoIP news out of CTIA, also held this week, click here.)

Of course, IMS remains a hot topic at all telecom events these days, but is particularly relevant at VON, given VoIP is its first application beyond wireless, for which it was created.

That’s why IMS is the focus of the latest work from the MultiService Forum (MSF), which this week announced release 3.0 of its architecture. This is first iteration of the MSF’s work to address IMS.

While the MSF Ref 3 architecture addresses IMS, it is not pure IMS, and so applies to both legacy and newer gear, explained Jim Eachern, an MSF board member and the man in charge of Nortel’s carrier VoIP standards strategy. Release 3.0 will be the basis for the Global MSF Interoperability (GMI) events planned in late October at a handful of locations around the globe.

As Eachern noted, IMS is about decoupling services from the physical network and about distributed networking. “That’s the whole idea behind this,” he said, adding that with IMS, geography no longer matters.

Dovetailing with that message, session border controller vendor Newport Networks at VON this week introduced the 310 Border Gateway. The product basically delivers media handling in a small-scale package without the signalling piece offered in traditional session border controller solutions.

“SBCs are definitely moving toward a distributed architecture, especially with large operators” because it’s more efficient to handle media on the edge of the network to optimize routing, said Guy Reiffer, product marketing director at Newport Networks.

Of course, no discussion of Pulver’s Video on the Net show would be complete without at least of mention of exhibitor news in this vein. So, here goes.

Test vendor IneoQuest Technologies at VON this week is demonstrating with Cisco Systems Inc. how its new IQFlowTrace technology can find the source of dropped IP packets on video networks.

IQFlowTrace is an application running on IneoQuest’s Singulus G1-T solution, a test tool for field troubleshooting, engineering and debugging of triple-play networks. Tom Tucker, director of marketing at IneoQuest, said the IQFlowTrace application will be generally available this quarter.

Fall VON 2006 www.von.com
IneoQuest www.ineoquest.com
MultiService Forum www.msforum.org
Newport Networks Ltd. www.newport-networks.com
New Step Networks Inc. www.newstep.com
Nortel Networks Ltd. www.nortel.com
Sylantro Systems www.sylantro.com
VoxLib Corp. www.voxlib.com
XConnect Global Networks Ltd. www.xconnect.net

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