Voice Peering is Hot

At the Voice Peering Forum event here in sunny Miami Florida, the message is simple voice peering is growing by leaps and bounds. Stealth Communications is the company who runs this event and attendees generally are people who have joined the Voice Peering Fabric (VPF) or who are thinking of joining.

Simply stated the VPF allows interconnection of voice calls and services. The founder of Stealth Communications is Shrihari Pandit and he kicked off the days meeting with his usual optimism which was backed up by staggering growth numbers.

For examplethe VPF carried 139 billion minutes last year and has seen 750% growth for the last three years.

In addition, Shrihari mentioned upgrades to the VPF such as the ability to utilize IPV6. Shrihari made a point to mention IPV6 is needed as the current addressing scheme IPv4 will run out of IP addresses in a few years.

In addition the VPF ENUM Registry will offer CNAM or Caller Name which will be a valuable service for CLECs or VoIP providers looking to match caller names with calls. There will be presence information embedded in the ENUM database and there is now support for MMS, SMS and EMS mapping.

The room is filled with people who are looking to learn more about VoIP peering and others who are here to network. At every VPF event I have attended there seems to be an increasing energy level and this conference is no exception.

Perhaps a good sign of how much this market has grown in the last few years is the fact that a few members of the Department of Defense are in attendance in the conferences today.

As the number of minutes and number of members of this fabric grow the value of the network grows as well. We can thank voice peering for helping to drive calling costs lower for not only service providers but large enterprises and call centers as well.

Events like the Voice Peering Forum are very helpful as they help educate the market on why peering is important and it lets companies understand how this relatively new phenomenon can help them reduce costs and provide new services for their customers or employees, students and/or patients. So while the weather here in Miami is very warm, it may be eclipsed by the sheer heat emanating from the ever-growing voice peering phenomenon taking place here on Miami Beach.