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A recent report titled “VoIP Peering (News - Alert) & the Future of Telecom Network Interconnection” from Heavy Reading explores “the various functional elements of VoIP peering, identifies which elements each of the peering platform operators is addressing with their offerings, and provides insight into the future direction of this industry segment,” according to report officials.

The report also analyzes the VoIP peering strategies of eight leading VoIP service providers and looks at each operator's current and long-term plans for VoIP network peering.

So why is such an in-depth look necessary?

As Heavy Reading officials explain, until recently, most VoIP networks, whether carrier or enterprise, interconnected via the circuit-based public switched telephone network (PSTN), with VOIP calls having to be transcoded into TDM circuits to be switched through the PSTN.

This has been changing over the past few years. Now, carriers can interconnect their networks at the IP level using session border controllers even though call routing has remained based on the PSTN telephone number. And that’s okay if the call ultimately terminates on a PSTN phone. But it doesn’t always do so, and VoIP peering enables direct network interconnection without using the PSTN.

As TMCnet reported, voice peering has gone from “non-existence and then existence, but complete obscurity to understood and applied, but not widely publicized. All of that is now changing with not only the introduction, but also the expansion of session border controllers for the enterprise.”

One of the major advantages of VoIP peering, obviously, is cost reduction, but it also gives users the ability to provide VoIP services and features across networks, which the existing PSTN infrastructure can’t be counted upon to do in the future.

Wholesalers may be out of luck, however, unless they switch their value proposition. As the report found, “since carriers can directly interconnect much more easily with VoIP, a lot of the value provided by wholesalers in the past is being eliminated. The result will be a movement from the role of a minute reseller to an interconnection facilitator.”