XConnect and iPeerX Combine

By Rich Tehrani

President and Editor-in-Chief

 

The concept of peering inherently means that many companies can work together and transfer data seamlessly across the peering point. This makes sense, but there are few competitors out there in the world of voice or VoIP peering—and these competitors don’t allow seamless peering across their networks.

For this reason, I wasn’t too surprised to hear that XConnect is buying iPeerX—a company that is Pulver-seeded according to XConnect.

Here are some highlights from the announcement:


Bigger is better, and more importantly, necessary. Having disparate competing VoIP peering networks is not helpful to furthering the industry. This is better for their existing VoBB partners, and certainly a great entry point for prospective partners.

Combined, the companies will have approximately 300 service providers in 30 countries, together contributing over eight million active VoIP numbers to XConnect’s ENUM Registry as well as a further 120 million numbers registered for future use.

XConnect is the company that lined up all the Dutch MSOs to peer with each other on its own private peering network. It’s particularly cool because cable operators dominate the high speed internet landscape in the Netherlands and there is more than 6 percent VoIP penetration already. Although peering has the potential to hurt phone companies—many are embracing it and hoping it doesn’t take off at the same time.

It is a bit early to tell what this means but it is worth sharing comments from Jeff Pulver, who will now be on the board of XConnect.

 

According to Jeff, “VoIP Peering (News - Alert) will drive the adoption of the new generation of IP communications including video, voice and messaging. The success of VoIP Peering depends on having a sufficiently large community of service providers – this deal creates an industry player with the critical mass to succeed.”

So there you have it: more VoIP Peering news. This is pretty big announcement and I am impressed that so many service providers are peering. As I wrote recently, the more organizations that peer, the more valuable the peering network becomes. It seems that this really could be the year of VoIP peering as I predicted last year.

I am looking forward to all of the peering activity that will take place in a month at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo. I can just imagine how much more the VoIP peering market will grow in just a few weeks.

 

Rich Tehrani is President and Group Editor in Chief at TMC. In addition he is the Chairman of the world’s best attended VoIP event, Internet Telephony Conference & Expo.