VoIP peering technology review: request for information

John Todd jtodd at loligo.com
Fri Oct 15 15:11:52 UTC 2004



I'd like to review any methods by which operators are currently 
exchanging e.164 telephony route information between VoIP systems 
(excluding SS7.)  In the last ~1 year, I have not heard of any 
significant changes in the manner in which routes are exchanged; the 
typical method still seems to be Excel spreadsheets or CSV files. 
ENUM seems to be gaining some ground, with providers populating their 
own root servers, but I haven't heard of or seen a complete 
specification from anyone - it's been mostly rumor, so detailed 
implementation examples of ENUM use would be appreciated.  Bonus 
points for telling me how this scales without a single root to bind 
them.

If you are using an automated method to inform your VoIP telephony 
"peers" of new VoIP-enabled DIDs or (more importantly) routes that 
you offer, I would like to hear about it, even if it's just a 
sentence or a link to go find more information.  Do you use TRIP? 
XML exchanges?  SQL over TCP?  LDAP?  I am especially interested in 
"accessible" methods that don't require significant capital 
investment in proprietary technology, hardware, or service provider 
products.

Just as important would be the topics of non-disclosure between 
peering entities and other political issues surrounding exchange of 
customer (specific) or route (general) data and the threat of 
unveiling your customer base details to your competitors.  That 
discussion makes me think of the same arguments 10 years ago with 
BGP...

I am often asked to speak and write on the topic of VoIP peering (if 
there is such a thing) and I am  trying to prevent being out-of-date 
on this quickly changing environment.  I am not able to keep up with 
digging through the marketing foam to find the good information 
underneath, so I'm probably missing some interesting trends.  All 
answers will be anonymized unless you specifically request the 
answers to be publicly attributed.  Please reply privately; a summary 
of useful data will be sent back to the list(s).

JT



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