Thursday, June 12, 2008

ATIS Inter-Carrier VoIP Workshop

The migration to an all IP world takes another small step forward. This week ATIS is holding a workshop in Washington D.C. to discuss Inter-Carrier VoIP Call Routing (ICVR). If you do not know, ATIS stands for Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions. ATIS is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and creates telecom industry standards for everything from provisioning to routing to billing.

The objective of the ICVR workshop will be to determine if there is consensus that it is desirable to reach a single inter-carrier VoIP routing solution. If a single routing solution is desired, then the workshop will begin development of a roadmap to achieve a single routing solution. This workshop is based on the work that has been done by the IVCR Focus Group which began in 2006. In January 2008 ATIS published the ATIS Inter-Carrier VoIP Call Routing Assessment and Work Plan. The Work Plan is a good document that describes alternative models for inter-carrier VoIP routing. The Work Plan identifies that inter-carrier billing and settlement are requirements, but no work has been done to define the requirements.

We are happy to see that IP interconnection is getting some serious focus by ATIS which is driven by the legacy telecom operators in the US. This will be good for VoIP vendors and good for consumers if the derived standards encourage an open competitive market.

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