TeliaSonera International Carrier (TSIC) has launched an IPX service, joining a long list of carriers offering IP exchange services.

TSIC announced its service on May 13, with availability to both TeliaSonera (News - Alert) group and external operators. At launch, it carries TSIC's roaming and signaling portfolio plus Voice over IP. Later this year, LTE signaling will be added with a "comprehensive suite" of additional IPX services to follow, according to a company press release.

To differentiate itself from existing IPX services already on the market, TSIC is touting its 100G optical network covering North America, Europe and key markets in Eastern Europe. The company has a total of 200 points of presence (PoPs) worldwide.

But the world of IPX is a crowded one, with numerous Tier 1 carriers offering services and building impressive stories of coverage, carriers and operators. BT (News - Alert) Global Telecom started promoting IPX in earnest last year, with two global exchange hubs on line in London and Singapore, with others expected to come on line this year. BT expects at least one quarter of international calls will be done in HD voice in three years time and offers a transcoding solution to complement its GIPx service for calls that need to move between mobile and wireline HD voice codecs, as well as between HD voice codecs and the narrowband world.

In April 2013, Tata Communications announced its HD voice end-to-end deliver service running on its IPX+ offering. The carrier said it had 210 mobile network operators connected via IP voice interconnect, with 26 operators "HD ready" and four operators already deploying HD voice.

And then there's France Telecom (News - Alert) which announced it was moving HD voice calls between Romania and Moldova last fall. France Telecom is also already moving traffic between its UK network and Deutsche Telekom's (News - Alert) as a part of its EE venture. Ultimately all of France Telecom's subsidiaries around the globe will exchange HD voice calls via an IPX mechanism.

The biggest area for growth in the IPX arena is not solely HD voice, but all LTE (News - Alert) services. LTE roaming will be big business and profits for carriers, since the all IP, all data networks are being turned up around the globe Users -- especially business users -- want seamless roaming with the fastest speeds they can get. Carriers are happy to oblige, so long as they can get a premium on the traffic.

What this leads to is a competition between Tier 1 providers to lock up smaller providers for IPX services around the globe, with the companies holding the large number of providers able to squeeze out smaller ones at some point in the future.