CableLabs’ peering announcement is long overdue
It has been over two years since some of the first peering federations were announced. Following the Netherlands setup facilitated by XConnect there was a lot of enthusiasm about the CableLabs’ peering RFP. However, two years into trials, there has been no official announcement from CableLabs. An equally bigger peering RFP put out much later by GSM Association was finalized during the early part of 2008.
What I had heard some six months ago was that the CableLabs peering contract was awarded to a smaller ENUM server company (my guess is NetNumber since they are the most widely selected routing database vendor in the cable segment). However a bigger player in form of NeuStar was brought in for some handholding.
NetNumber server would perhaps handle the intra carrier routing while the NeuStar solution resolves inter-carrier routing. Perhaps the main factor holding back the potential of a cable VoIP peering federation is the fact that most cable MSOs have advanced much ahead in peering on individual basis than what CableLabs had envisaged two years ago. There are several bilateral peering arrangements and plain old ENUM usage among cable operators. Several vendors have been engaged by the cable MSOs to achieve that. The vendors involved include ENUM server vendors and those that have SBC capabilities such as Acme Packet and Sonus.
Acme Packet is in fact very active in bilateral VoIP peering in the cable segment. One of the references there include Sprint-TWC. For peering they use Acme SBC on borders where TWC hands off their PSTN termination traffic to Sprint. These are direct IP-IP connections. The cable companies have been pushing IP-IP connections among themselves as well. These bilateral initiatives are running in parallel to the multi-lateral initiative by CableLabs.
It remains to be seen what role CableLabs plays in VoIP peering going forward. Cable companies have so far been religious about CableLabs’ standards and initiatives. With VoIP however, there was a bit of a rebellion. Cable companies refused to stick to PacketCable and instead went for SIP based best efforts telephony, forcing PacketCable to adapt. With VoIP peering it seems that those Cable MSOs are content with what they are able to achieve on a bilateral basis.
