TELCORDIA LEVERAGES REGISTRY TO OFFER NEXT-GEN VoIP ROUTING

Telcordia Technologies will leverage one of its chief legacy assets, the Local Exchange Routing Guide developed during the Bellcore era, to offer carriers next-generation routing service for voice over IP. The company introduced its VoIP Routing Registry last week at Voice on the Net in Boston, and announced trials with Tier 1 carriers.

Telcordia's VRR is part of the company's IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) portfolio. It provides a way to centrally administer IP routing data so that VoIP calls can be efficiently routed over an IP network. It supports both SIP and ENUM protocols.

Telcordia is not first to market with a VoIP routing solution, and it won't be coming to market until mid-2006; however, it is the only company that can boast of the transitional power of the LERG, a database of every area code and exchange (NPA/NXX) that is used by carriers within the North American Numbering Plan to route inter-LATA calls over the public network.

“We aren't the only game in town, but our value proposition is that we are the only company that can provide both [public network] and VoIP routing data,” said Gary Richenaker, senior director of numbering and address initiatives for Telcordia.

The other players in town include NeuStar, VeriSign and Stealth Communications. However, the consensus so far is that there is plenty of room for everyone in this nascent market.

“It's still early on in terms of networks needing centralized registrars,” said Tom Kershaw, VeriSign's vice president of VoIP services. “You only need a centralized route service when you get to the millions of subscribers or at least hundreds of thousands. There are not a lot of carriers who have reached that volume yet in VoIP.”

That hasn't stopped these vendors from leveraging their core strengths to position themselves for when that day comes. Competitively, Kershaw said, each company has credibility and reach in this market. He points to VeriSign's domain name service, Telcordia's LERG and NeuStar's number portability administration center — the database for local number portability — as each company's competitive strength.

However, representatives from these three companies agreed that the market will need as much cooperation in this area as it needs competition. “We can't all selfishly pursue our own closed database solutions. We need to peer with one another so we can create as much mass as possible and create a public VoIP community,” Kershaw said.

NeuStar's chief technology officer, Mark Foster, agreed.

“At some level, we are all competing, but what we are already seeing happening is that we all come at the market differently,” he said. “And, in fact, these different vectors are inherently complementary in the long run.”

In the short run, there are trials to do. Telcordia is conducting trials in three phases: an engineering analysis trial, through which it and its carrier partners evaluate their network architectures, and two lab-to-lab network trials. In the first, Telcordia will act as a pseudo carrier by building a virtual private network to pass traffic between its firewall and the carrier's lab network. Finally, they will test intercarrier traffic.

When available next year, the system will be deployable both in carrier networks or as a hosted service, which Telcordia calls managed transaction services. “There needs to be an evolution from TDM to VoIP, and it needs to be as seamless as possible. We think that implementing Telcordia's VRR allows carriers that kind of seamless evolution,” Richenaker said.