Acme deploys 'open routing' with Jajah

Alternative service provider Jajah, whose IP backbone provides calling services not only for its own retail operations but other Web-based voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers including Yahoo, today detailed its use of Acme Packet’s session border controllers (SBCs) to help secure and route calls to public switched telephone network (PSTN) termination partners.

Jajah deployed the Acme SBCs in the vendor’s relatively new “open session routing” architecture, which decouples session routing lookup and execution – which Acme provides – from the actual routing database – which in this case is being provided by TransNexus. In addition to call routing execution, Acme Packet’s SBCs provide security functions including denial of service attack prevention, access control and signaling rate-limiting to protect Jajah’s IP core.

In a Yahoo call scenario, for instance, the call would come in via the Internet and enter the Jajah data center through the Acme SBC, which would query the TransNexus routing database for the best path to direct the call, based on the ultimate destination as well as statistics on recent completions, call quality and least-cost routing data, said Kevin Mitchell, Acme Packet’s director of wireless solutions marketing. Jajah terminates calls to over 200 countries worldwide.

“The concept is to centralize routing information as much as possible to speed up route resolution decision-making, leveraging our fast, high-performance lookup engine,” said Mitchell, noting that Jajah routes the VoIP calls without using softswitches in the network. Acme has deployed open session routing architectures with a handful of customers to date, including tier-one service provider Telus.

Acme announced its open session routing architecture and partner ecosystem last April. In some implementations of OSR, Acme’s SBCs will query public ENUM databases, such as Pathfinder, the GSMA-operated destination discovery service operated by NeuStar, a capability Acme announced in November. In other cases, such as with Jajah, the query will be made to a private database. In the case of the Jajah deployment, the routing is handled using the SIP protocol, rather than ENUM, said Acme Packet’s Mitchell. Vendors and service bureaus are pitching a variety of approaches to routing and terminating IP-based calls (read Telephony’s recent TechUpdate on the topic: The Power of Phone Numbers in an IP World)

In addition to its Web-embedded click-to-call retail services, Jajah offers a fully outsourced IP communications platform, including PSTN and IP termination, billing, payments, fraud prevention and quality management. In addition to Yahoo, other Web companies such as Plaxo and eHarmony have used the system to deliver Web-initiated calls. For its part, Yahoo uses Jajah to fuel its premium “Phone In” and “Phone Out ” instant messaging-based phone services.