Important Piece of the VoIP Puzzle: Neustar SIP-IX
VoIP Planet has this article about Neustar announcing the release of its SIP exchange. This is definitely related to my previous post on moving towards an all IP infrastructure. For those of you who do not know this company, here is a short description.
Neustar operates the authoritative directories that manage virtually all telephone area codes and numbers that enable the dynamic routing of calls among thousands of service providers in the United States and Canada. Since 1997, NeuStar has served as the FCC-appointed administrator of the North American Numbering Plan (NANP)—an integrated telephone numbering plan serving 19 countries across North America and the Caribbean—with the overall responsibility for neutrally overseeing the assignment and use of NANP numbering resources. In addition, they manage the authoritative directories for the .us and .biz Internet domains—as well as the Common Short Codes, part of the short messaging service (or SMS) that is used extensively within the U.S. cellular telephone industry.
If you live in North America, you have probably used their services without even know it. Anyway, this move by Neustar to offer a SIP exchange is an important piece in the voice-over-IP puzzle. I have been doing VoIP (particularly discovery and ENUM) research for the past few years. Right now, there are many scattered VoIP providers who simply connect to the PSTN (as edges of the PSTN and don’t peer with each other). The problem with this current scenario is that there are many VoIP islands. The biggest reason for this is that there are so many VoIP providers out there that it would be difficult to have bilateral agreements with them all (increased network complexity). With the introduction of a SIP exchange and its requisite address infrastructure (ENUM), it should not be possible for these VoIP islands to discover each other and route traffic directly (and even apply least cost routing algorithms) without having to pass through the PSTN. This is definitely a major step in the right and necessary direction for VoIP. This can potentially lead to the de-focusing of the PSTN and its gradual replacement with VoIP.
