VoIP: Peering
Most telco's are providing free sip to sip phone connections only within their customer network. Some like FWD, SipPhone, IPTel and others provide the ability to connect with other networks. Then there is Public Switched Telephone Network ( PSTN ). How do we connect phones with limited keypads to the internet ? "ENUM" (RFC 2916 ) refers to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocol that resolves a telephone number to a series of URLs. How do we migrate to VoIP while maintaining universality ? How do we avoid trading geograhic locality for corporate boundaries ? Perhaps we can create a situation where the we can automatically select routes that are available, the most economical for each call we make. Sounds familiar somehow.
Linktionary Sometimes it is good to have an overview that at least to some degree gives some order and history to the many terms and technologies that are VoIP. "Description of Voice over IP (VoIP) from Tom Sheldon's Encyclopedia of Networking and Telecommunications"
E164.org: a non-profit ENUM registry "E164.org lists regular PSTN telephone numbers and maps them to VoIP (Voice over IP) addresses such as those provided by Free World Dialup, Broadband Phone Providers like Vonage, or even people who run their own Asterisk system" Based in Vancouver, BC, Canada
VPF: The Voice Peering Fabric "The VPF [Voice Peering FabricTM] is a distributed Layer 2 Ethernet Exchange for the purpose of exchanging VoIP traffic. The service provides an economical traffic exchange environment where VoIP participants' can directly connect to each other, avoiding the un-necessary delays and relays." Based in New York City, Chicago.
NeuStar's ENUM Public Trial "NeuStar's ENUM Public Trial has been designed to allow equipment manufacturers and service providers to test a publicly shared database and to use numbers registered in that database to test client resolvers.É NeuStar, Inc. , founded in 1996, is the leading provider of critical clearinghouse services that enable communications networks to interoperate."
SIP Center: ENUM "The SIP Center is a portal for the commercial development of the Session Initiation Protocol. Serving both the SIP community and the wider industry, the SIP Center offers comprehensive technical and market resources as well as an environment for the testing of SIP implementations." Based in Newport, Wales, NP18 2LH United Kingdom
IPTel: TRIP (Telephony Routing over IP) "TRIP and the gateway registration protocol are orthogonal to the DNS-based mechanisms specified in ENUM and RFC 3264. Those mechanisms are used to translate a URI, representing a name, to an address. If that address is a phone number in the telephone network, trip and tgrep can be used to assist in determining the right route (through various gateways) to that number."
TransNexus: Open Settlement Protocol (OSP) "The major benefit from OSP for VoIP carriers is it provides a single, highly secure mechanism for managing diverse VoIP networks.Ê OSP provides a common interface between VoIP networks and the operations and billing support systems (OSS/BSS) used to manage VoIP networks.Ê By using a global VoIP to OSS/BSS interface, carriers are now enabled to build and manage multi-vendor, multi-protocol networks without impacting their central routing and billing operations.Ê The benefits are greater flexibility, vendor independence and lower operating costs."
