A recent white paper from Empirix (News - Alert) takes a look at VoIP peering, offering solid insight and advice for end-to-end visibility of networks and performance through comprehensive monitoring and automated processes, showing readers how to 'enable service issues to be identified and corrected before they impact the peering relationship or, worse, affect the customer.'
With all the welcome success and growth of VoIP comes the not-so-welcome pressure on network operators’ bandwidth resources. This pressure affects the public in VoIP peering, which involves carriers establishing direct connections between their networks to exchange traffic, rather than routing it via the public Internet.
Disputes between peering partners have led to connections being severed, which of course does nobody's customers any good. As the paper says, however, 'switch-offs are only the tip of the iceberg and this paper argues that, in order to mitigate the risks associated with these often fragile relationships, carriers should establish measures' for the peering ecosystem.
'The continued growth of VoIP and the associated demand for ever-higher bandwidth are straining the VoIP network operators and their peering partners,' the paper says, and it's hard to argue with that.
Peering itself is the process through which service providers exchange traffic with one another by establishing direct connections between their networks. The business model you're probably familiar with, the most common one, is one based on mutuality, where peering is free-of-charge as long as both partners exchange relatively equal amounts of traffic.
Where you run into disputes, such as the recent high-profile one between Cogent and Sprint (News - Alert), is when the ratio of traffic traded by the partners swings out of balance.
If an agreement can't be reached the carrier which feels wronged may simply switch off the connections to the peering partner’s network.
And while the greatest share of IP peering traffic has traditionally been Internet traffic, VoIP and video services are increasingly being bundled with Internet traffic, which makes this a VoIP issue.
'As a result,' the paper finds, 'VoIP service providers need to ensure, day to day, that their traffic is accorded the same Quality of Service on partner networks as the partners’ own traffic.'