Voice Peering Featured Article

Voice Peering may be the wave of the future. According to market research firm Infonetics Research (News - Alert) in its second quarter Service Provider VoIP Equipment and Subscribers market share and forecast report, worldwide service provider Voice over IP equipment revenue totaled $598 million in Q2 09.

 

"The product and competitive landscape of the service provider VoIP equipment market is reshaping in 2009, as stronger vendors weather the storm and, in some segments, even thrive. While the overall market is still down from a year ago, it stabilized in the second quarter, with flat quarter-over-quarter revenue,” said Diane Myers, Infonetics Research's directing analyst for service provider VoIP and IMS. “The healthiest segments were voice application servers, high and low density media gateways, and Class 5 softswitches. EMEA and North America had strong growth."

 

Stealth Communications’ (News - Alert) “Voice Peering Fabric” enables a VoIP peering environment where one provider can connect into one city location and another carrier can connect into another location in another city with the VPF providing the link.

According to the company’s Web site, voice peering can occur on a bilateral and multilateral basis.

 

“Bilateral peering is when two parties come together directly and exchange traffic, a commercial relationship is usually associated with this type of transaction. These are typically the transactions that occur within the VPF Minutes Market and VPF ASP Market,” officials said, “Multilateral peering is when all parties agree to a common set of policies to exchange traffic. A great example is the VPF ENUM Registry, where all parties agree to send and receive calls between one other directly for free.”

 

The report also stated that North American service providers and conferencing service providers continue to drive media server growth, one of the few segments that continues to experience year-over-year revenue growth.

 

The next step for VoIP will most likely be in the voice application server market with a 31 percent increase worldwide revenue in Q2 09 driven, according to the report, by the move to residential VoIP.

 

Earlier this month, on his VoIP Peering blog, Hunter Newby (News - Alert) wrote about how O2, a German wireless company, announced that it would allow VoIP usage on its wireless network.

 

Voice peering can help businesses keep productivity high by using a private network and the ability to never having to depend on other service providers or fear of a crash in the system or network.

 

CEO Shrihari Pandit (News - Alert) said, “supporting new types of services is also an area where voice peering has great utility, there are distinct advantages to terminating traffic.”

 

To learn more about the benefits of peering for service providers, please visit the Voice Peering channel on TMCnet, or visit Stealth Communications’ Web site.