ENTERPRISE VoIP PEERING

 

Will 2006 be the Year of Enterprise Peering? by Richard Grigonis

ENTERPRISE VOIP PEERING IS SOME WAYS THE LOGICAL SUCCESSOR TO THE Extranets of the 1990s. An Extranet is basically a corporate intranet that allows various levels of accessibility to trusted outsiders (but not the general public) seeking data; e.g., information services or product catalogs for suppliers, customers and partners. The ultimate extrapolation of this establishes a “ federation” of peers; it “federates” data.

Enterprises, always eager to cut costs, soon realized that they could “peer” VoIP calls with other companies they call frequently. The basic idea is to keep the phone calls off the PSTN. Primitive ways of doing this include using two VoIP softphones supporting end-to-end encryption over the public Internet, or to extend a corporate VPN. (Typically, though, VPNs aren’t used for corporation-to-corpo-ration traffic; they’re mostly used for connecting to remote users.)

In more formal peering scenarios, a VoIP call originating in the enterprise can either be directly connected to the other party via private lines (the direct interconnection model) or else the call travels via Layer 2 circuits (Cable, DSL, Ethernet, WiFi, WiMAX) to an ISP, peering service provider, federator, nexus point, collocation facility, carrier hotel or interexchange carrier which may have specific expertise and equipment for handling interworking and translation details associated with peering (the exchange-based interconnection model). The enterprise may simply maintain a rack at this location, where they cross-connect to the intended party, or else a connection is made to other collocation points in distant cities, thus forming a sort of private WAN.