services, security services, identity management–it goes on and on. These services are emerging to allow enterprises to pick from a menu of global reachable services to incorporate into a larger offering that they may make for their telecom infrastructure.”

What’s Holding Back Peering?

work, which is how it’s mainly being used today. The group Pingtel offers SIPxchange ECS, an enterprise-grade, full fea-
was originally called VoIPeer [Voice over IP Peering], but I tured SIP-based IP PBX, and SIPxchange CallManager, an
think it’s official name will ultimately be SPEER [SIP Peering]. open source SIP/VoIP routing and control solution that works
They’ll help people work through the various issues associ- with various media gateways, media servers and phones.
ated with the peering of SIP / SIMPLE communications.” William Rich, Pingtel’s president and CEO, says: “What we
do with peering is to allow our customers to connect to their
Move Over, Peering preferred IP network backbone for handling voice and other _{eal-time communications. We do that using TLS [Transport}
Brian Silver, the CTO of BlueNote Networks (www.Blue- Level Security], which is more or less the accepted standards-
NoteNetworks.com), a company founded in January 2005, based way of doing secure network peering. It allows for the
says: “We build a software-based alternative to today’s fixed- understanding that the device that has to peer–in our case,
function telephony products. Our architecture consists of a SIP PBX–is a trusted entity and should be allowed to peer.
seven software applications that do various things in the Thus, we essentially facilitate enterprise peering off the ‘front’
enterprise telecom infrastructure such as signaling services, or ‘back,’ as you’d like to think of it, of our SIP PBX.”
PSTN/TDM gateway services and conferencing. We also have Rich observes, “More peering occurs in places such as
an application called SessionPeer which enables enterprises Germany and the Netherlands because there are many small-
to establish peering arrangements between partners. It’s all er European carriers offering a ‘SIP Trunk,’ which is a peer
done in software, so you can run it on any box you see fit.” trunk into the IP network. Ultimately, the US has a much
BlueNote’s SessionPeer provides enterprise connectivity larger market opportunity, and the big carriers are now put-
and interoperability with external services, service providers ting together their peering products.”
and hosting facilities. SessionPeer traverses firewalls and NAT “Two things still hold peering back,” says Rich. “First, the
devices, providing additional naming and identify features to industry’s overall security model isn’t complete. As I men-
allow enterprises to gain access, use and manage external ser- tioned, TSL is a major component, but other components
vices. It also extends enterprise voice services to suppliers will soon appear which involve the generation, understand-
and business partners to enhance collaboration, minimize the ing and authentication of certificates. The second inhibitor is
enterprise’s carrier dependency and service costs, and allow the lack of a common protocol infrastructure. We’re one of
for peering with external service providers for IP Centrex, the few companies offering technology that has used standard
hosted conference facilities, Internet geography services, and SIP from the beginning. You’ll soon see SIP trunking com-
other SIP-based services. Indeed, SessionPeer enables com- ing off the back of equipment from Cisco, Avaya and others.
panies to seamlessly integrate multimedia services and ap- The combination of a security model and the emergence of a
plications from third party service providers–for example, standard peering protocol, namely SIP, will boost acceptance
NetGeo, VeriSign and Vonage–and Extranets for customers, of peering in 2006.”
partners and suppliers, too.

“^{There’s no mandate that voice be an additional feature on} top of an existing data Extranet,” says Silver. “Peering isn’t ^{The Broader Perspective} just for Extranets anymore, if you will. Look at the way car- Dr. Chalan Aras, VP of marketing for Ditech Communications riers build their networks; they actually leverage many ser- ( www.ditechcom.com), vendors of Jasomi’s session bor-vices from other providers. Verizon might use long distance der controller technology, says: “We look at peering from a minutes from MCI or Sprint. When you dial 411 these days, broader perspective. In peering models, the primary motiva-you aren’t connected to the carrier’s operator; you’re con- tion is how you get signaling across and how you connect nected instead to an outsourced call center. Performing Local your IP streams, which are obviously different. So, in addi-Number Portability in the wireless environment is not part of tion to physical connections, there are media considerations the carrier’s wireless infrastructure; it’s actually an outsourced as to how enterprises peer. How do you check and maintain service. And so carriers have found better economics by audio quality? What about SIP interoperability? How do you leveraging services offered by others to build out their larger encrypt? How do you ensure the security level of the specific infrastructure.” call itself is preserved? How do you keep the service from

“Enterprises now want those same capabilities,” says Silver, being hijacked? That’s why one of our efforts involves heavy- “such as the ability to use minutes from an IP provider for duty encryption.” long distance services, which is a peered service, a ‘federated “Enterprise VoIP at the moment is staying pretty much in voice service’ if you will. An enterprise might want to use an the enterprise,” says Aras. “One issue is the lack of a widely IP Centrex solution for a portion of their telecom service, but available directory/registry function such as ENUM, which not all. Bringing that service into the larger enterprise tele- maps phone numbers to IP addresses for SIP phones, etc. How com infrastructure is a peering function. There are directory can you make sure that you have a unique ‘phone number’ or