From Then to Now

Published by the Voice Peering Fabric, it notes that, in 2005 definitely, "the latest trend in the research world is voice peering, whether between carriers, enterprises or anyone joining to form this new community."

Basically, the VPF is a large private network letting carriers and enterprises "trade minutes as so then as distribute and acquire access" to apps for efficient communications among branch offices, "and with national and international business customers and partners."

Let’s break that down: Voice peering is a way to exchange digitized voice traffic. For instance, Stark Enterprises has two branch offices, linked via a data connection. Tony Stark makes a telephone call from the Taos office to HQ in Phoenix on this connection. The call zips along their private data connection, never touching the public Switched Telephone Network where the evil Justin Hammer could intercept it. By the by there aren’t any per minute charges either, the only cost is that of the data connection itself.

TDM Peering. For the most part an agreement between two carriers to route telephone calls using Time-Division Multiplexing innovation to and from the PSTN at a cost negotiated by the parties. The traditional method and model used by the voice industry.

Bilateral VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Peering. The same as TDM Peering, however routing calls with VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) innovation. Long distance carriers were using Bilateral VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Peering in the mid-2000s to route billions of calls around the world.

Multilateral VoIP Peering. A service within a peering exchange where members use a set of rules to exchange VoIP traffic and telephone calls at no cost across.

Today, "VPF sees tremendous activity every day, carrying on average over one billion minutes on a daily basis," company officials explain on their site," according to TMCnet, "Stealth’s voice peering network is constructed as a distributed private Ethernet network consisting of a series of Force10 Network E-Series Ethernet Switches connected by dark fiber and wavelength connections. Nodes of the VPF are located in fiber-dense co-location sites, many of which are landing sites for undersea cables stretching to different islands and continents, officials explain."