The 10 that Established VoIP (Part 3: ITXC)
I have chosen ITXC among ‘The 10 That Established VoIP’ for the company’s pioneering contribution in the areas of International Long Distance (ILD) VoIP wholesale model, management of voice transportation over public Internet, commercial interoperability among varied VoIP platforms, and VoIP peering.
Working with a vast group of VoIP POP owners (ITXC itself owned a large numbers POPs) induced competition among termination partners which in turn resulted in more competitive rates than what companies like AT&T had access to. This kind of wholesale model was totally new. Even with a company as big as AT&T, you would have interconnect agreements only with a handful of service providers, while as ITXC had direct interconnects with hundreds of POP owners around the world, owing to open IP access to gateways over public Internet. That was something unknown in the old wholesale model.
The second most important contribution that ITXC made (and iBasis again was not that far behind here too) was the technique developed to tame the public internet for transportation of voice. Over time, ITXC and iBasis, evolved a sophisticated call routing technology that helped route voice over bandwidth-starved internet.
Third major contribution: ITXC played a big role in improving VoIP equipment indirectly.
Fourth major contribution: ITXC had big influence on interoperability. It facilitated the first commercial interoperability between Cisco, Clarent (now Verso) and Vocaltec.
Fifth major contribution: ITXC also led the market in terms of the new IP-to-IP peering voice internetworking model that is engineered today using session controllers.
ITXC, along with iBasis, was a significant catalyst in forcing the Accounting Rates down worldwide, thus making international calls affordable. Accounting rates came down because international wholesale VoIP became a reality. And international wholesale VoIP become a reality due to companies like ITXC and iBasis.
