FiberNet gets into VoIP peering

FiberNet Telecom Group became the latest firm to offer a voice-over-IP peering service today, with the launch of the company’s new Phenomenum offering.

The offering uses the Internet Engineering Task Force’s ENUM protocol to allow providers of VoIP service to terminate one another’s calls. Where a peering partner has the intended call recipient’s phone number in its database, calls can be transmitted without the use of the public switched telephone network.

FiberNet will initially offer its VoIP peering service at the large collocation facility at 60 Hudson Street in New York City and will expand it elsewhere based on customer demand. President and chief executive officer Jon DeLuca expects to make the first interconnections this quarter.

“We’re just at the beginning of this fundamental shift in core network architecture,” DeLuca said. “We wanted to be out in front of it.”

“There’s a market developing, but it’s still pretty nascent, for core VoIP peering,” he said. “Virtually all VoIP traffic still uses the PSTN as a clearing house for call origination and termination, which defeats the purpose of the whole thing.”

In launching the new service, FiberNet is following in the footsteps of other VoIP peer pioneers such as Verisign, Telcordia and Stealth Communications, which has already amassed millions of numbers in its phone-number database with the participation of providers such as XO Communications. DeLuca won’t disclose how many numbers FiberNet has in its database, but he hopes to distinguish Phenomenum by FiberNet’s experience offering carrier-grade services to the world’s largest service providers. FiberNet has about 220 customers in 25 countries and connectivity to a total of 650 service providers, including all four Bell companies and seven of the eight largest PTTs. FiberNet’s new offering will also include conversions of SIP and H323 traffic.

“Stealth was really the first [to offer such a service],” DeLuca said. “Without being disparaging to a competitor, one of the issues with Stealth is its infrastructure is not carrier-grade. As these systems scale and become more integral to carriers’ core networks, they’ll require a different level of service.”

“Stealth has done some interesting things, but I think they’re a smaller business,” he added.

However, DeLuca won’t rule out collaborating with Stealth and others like it in the future, perhaps establishing peering relationships to pool databases.

FiberNet’s news comes the same day that Equinix and NeuStar announced a partnership to jointly introduce new IP interconnection services next year.