“Many industry experts, such as Rich Tehrani, thought that 2006 was going to be the Year of Peering,” says Dearing, “and we saw that come to fruition. For example, we recently announced that we have a service-ready solution done with the folks at NeuStar (www.neustar.com) that will provide our customers with a way of quickly peering with one another using Internet exchanges around the globe. Likewise, many members of other peering exchanges are using the technology to interconnect with one another. Peering between carriers is really an interesting phenomenon and it really extends the value and the flexibility of the Internet to real-time services such as VoIP. We’re taking peering between carriers and we’re SIP-enabling them.”
“By doing this, we’re accomplishing several things,” says Dearing. “First, we’re giving them a secure way to interconnect with one another using a peering fabric. And we also give them a very flexible and reliable way to interconnect with directory services in conjunction with folks such as NeuStar, so everyone can find one another. Once they do that, they need only one connection to tie into the fabric and then after that they can use our platform’s session switching intelligence and session management intelligence to basically control and manage all of the logical or virtual connections that they have between themselves and other carriers. So it really becomes an Internet-like model to deliver any service, and it enables a sort of new network economy, or a community of carriers that can interact with one another, each perhaps specializing in a different area and complementing their partners within that community.”
Dearing elaborates: “The notion is, if an RLEC out in Iowa wants to offer VoIP services to an end user, that user can employ the RLEC/ILEC’s broadband services as well as 411 services from another service provider, such as
INFONXX (News - Alert)
, that may be accessed by IP in one of their points of presence [POPs]. But the user can also resort to the services of carriers such as iBasis to do international long distance. So, all of these carriers are coming together to offer the end user a broadband service that has VoIP or
Vonage (News - Alert)
-like capabilities and all of that can be bundled under the label or brand of the RLEC. It’s a way for them to now compete against a much larger carrier or service provider. It’s an interesting ecosystem that’s developing and the ‘glue’ that’s tying all of these guys together are the peering points that are being established around the world, along with the intelligent interconnects that they’ll use to actually interconnect with their peering points.”
Solegy (News - Alert)
Solegy’s managed service deployment platform, ServicePDQ, allows for a cost-effective means for network operators, service providers and content developers to quickly launch news services and applications, and in the process achieve competitive differentiation, integrate disparate solutions (VoIP, content distribution, intelligent session management), manage third-party content and relationships, and create a compelling value proposition for customers.
Eric Hernaez, CEO of Solegy (www.solegy.com), says, “Our platform is a back office for session management, with the ability to establish business policies and rules to be applied to sessions. For the past seven years it has been in operation as a hosted back office for Vonage-type companies. We have some pre-built applications too. Our platform was built to follow the IMS service logic. We say that our ServicePDQ is ‘IMS-aligned’. It’s had the same concepts in place since 2001. We have four basic VoIP-based services we sell today: SOHO broadband, the Vonage-like service; Calling Cards, Callback and Wholesale Peering. We sell these services today to about 80 ITSPs around the world.”
“We created our platform along with a softswitch and media server,” says Hernaez, “so in our current configuration our business policy engine is drawing on information from databases such as those for billing database customer management and reporting. The platform applies its policies and rules to sessions as it comes through our session border controllers or softswitch and media servers.”
“When you place the IMS layer on top of that, we become a DIAMETER Charging gateway,” says Hernaez. “DIAMETER, the successor to RADIUS, is the charging mechanism defined in IMS. We have such a gateway in place today that theoretically could be used by any session border controller or media server that is able to connect to a DIAMETER Charging gateway. So far there are none that we’ve been able to find. We’ve been talking to companies such as NexTone and
Sansay (News - Alert)
, that are in the process of developing them. Basically, where we add value is in what we call the service deployment platform, which is the layer that’s on top of call control and is just providing information and intelligence to be able to manage those call control sessions, or any kind of session for that matter.”
“In our experience, there’s a lot of talk and very little ‘meat on the bones’ in terms of IMS-based services so far,” says Hernaez. “We’ve had our DIAMETER Charging gateway in place, but we can’t find anybody to test with who has an application that would use such a gateway.” continued...
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