Voice peering, also called VoIP peering, refers to the forwarding of calls from one
ITSP An Internet telephony service provider (ITSP) offers digital telecommunications services based on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) that are provisioned via the Internet.
ITSPs provide services to end-users directly or as whole-sale suppliers to ...
to another ITSP directly using
VoIP
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...
technology. The call is not forwarded over the
PSTN
The public switched telephone network (PSTN) provides infrastructure and services for public telecommunication. The PSTN is the aggregate of the world's circuit-switched telephone networks that are operated by national, regional, or local teleph ...
and this leads to costs savings (no call charges) and better quality because there is no
transcoding
Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target d ...
between the VoIP cloud and the PSTN, and then back from the PSTN to the next VoIP cloud. VoIP peering may occur on Layer 2 basis, i.e. a private network is provided, and carriers connected with it manage peering between one another, or on a layer 5 basis, i.e. peering occurs on open networks, with routing and signaling managed by a central provider.
Voice peering can occur on a bilateral or multilateral basis. Bilateral peering does not scale when many service providers seek to interconnect and peer with one another. Standards on Multilateral, layer 5 peering are under development by the
IETF
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...
working group on VoIP Peering, SPEERMINT.
See also
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Telephone number mapping
Telephone number mapping is a system of unifying the international telephone number system of the public switched telephone network with the Internet addressing and identification name spaces. Internationally, telephone numbers are systematically ...
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Distributed Universal Number Discovery
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iNum Initiative
The iNum (international number) initiative was a project by Voxbone to create a global dial code for IP communications. Voxbone is a Belgian company specializing in wholesale telephone numbers for VoIP applications. The International Telecommunic ...
External links
White Paper on SIP Peering
{{DEFAULTSORT:Voice Peering
Voice over IP