IP Communications

VoIP services are growing — that statement shouldn’t surprise any of you. Consumers and businesses alike are increasingly adopting IP Communications as a way of not only cutting expenses, but, perhaps more importantly today, to enhance their communications experiences.

 

Just as with traditional telephony services, the more VoIP customers service providers sign, the more VoIP calls cross their networks and, therefore, the greater their reliance on inter-operator connections. Certainly, this fact has been made no more blatantly obvious than by the recent undersea cable cuts in the Mediterranean Sea, which underscored the importance of inter-carrier relationships in order to maintain service availability in time of distress.

 

Of course, that’s an extreme example, and the simple fact is these network interconnections are a necessity at all times — simply because of the fact that different people and businesses using different network operators — a fact that certainly doesn’t preclude them from needing to communicate with one another.

 

Imagine, for instance, a network operator telling its customers, “We’re sorry, but you won’t be able to talk to you customers on AT&T’s (News - Alert) network or BT’s network,” because they don’t have the appropriate interconnects in place. That provider wouldn’t last long.

 

The truth is there is a large, thriving service global provider community, offering a vast array of services, which constantly are required to interconnect with on another, whether due to regulated national interconnects or ad hoc peering arrangements.

 

The question for providers, however, must be: With all the variants in carrier technology, how is all this going to work?

 

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine — perhaps even unrealistic to expect — that the full complement of today’s VoIP and multimedia services are going to interoperate seamlessly, even if they all operate using the same SIP standard. Indeed, there are different “flavors” of SIP, just as there are different, not always compatible softswitches, from which media sessions originate. When you factor in the huge number of client devices available today, the situation becomes even more complex — and even more so when considering the various media types commonly in use today.

 

In order to ensure calls and sessions are properly routed and connected between these various origination and termination points, it’s often necessary to rely on a third-party intervention to manage potential inconsistencies and to create compatible signaling to ensure service — and, ultimately, revenue.

 

To learn about inter-network mediation — in other words, how to fix incompatibilities at network borders — including the issues to consider and alternatives for addressing those issues, be sure to listen to the archive of the recent Webinar, Inter-Network Mediation in Multimedia Networks. During the hour-long event, Newport Networks’ (News - Alert) Dave Gladwin not only offered an overview of the topic, but also industry updates, and the technical, regulatory, and commercial drivers that are feeding the growth of today’s IP network interconnects.

 

Indeed, with the IP Communications space only in its relative infancy, and VoIP users, products, and services on the rise for the foreseeable future, the borders that connect disparate networks will be the keys to delivering service quality and reliability. Listen to Dave’s session to find out why and how you can better ensure you meet the needs of your customers.