Industry Banks on Use of Clearinghouse, Settlement Standards to Boost IPTelephony
The Internet protocol (IP) telephony industry is one
step away from having a standard system that will
allow providers to reciprocate traffic easily while
tracking usage and compensation rates through call
detail records.
Open Settlement Protocol (OSP), a plan for
interdomain authentication, authorization and
accounting standards, received approval from a
working group of the European Telecommunications
Standards Institute (ETSI) (www.etsi.fr) on Sept. 1
and is awaiting formal ratification of the entire
organization. ETSI is implementing OSP as part of its
project TIPHON, which was chartered to establish
global standards for Internet telephony.
Supporters of OSP believe these standards will
increase routing flexibility of IP telephony calls and
hasten deployment by service providers.
"For Internet telephony to succeed, the industry needs
ubiquitous interoperability," says Jim Dalton, president
and CEO of TransNexus LLC
(www.transnexus.com), a clearinghouse service
provider.
Use of these standards will make it easier for carriers
to get into business, he adds. Without a clearinghouse,
IP telephony providers would have to strike
proprietary deals with others to originate and terminate
their traffic. But with common industry standards and
use of a clearinghouse that has contracts with several
service providers, the process of negotiating traffic
reciprocation becomes a lot less taxing for each
individual provider.
"Clearly this makes routing more flexible because
carriers can gain more choices of how they can route
calls," Dalton notes. He adds that the OSP plan is a
key commercial enabler for IP telephony because the
standards provide a clear-cut method for carriers to
share revenues.
Five U.S. companies with interests in IP telephony
have banded together to promote the OSP standards.
Those companies include networking solution vendors
3Com Corp. (www.3com.com) and Cisco Systems
Inc. (www.cisco.com), as well as clearinghouse
organizations GRIC Communications Inc.
(www.gric.com), iPass Inc. (www.ipass.com) and
TransNexus.
"I think that this show of unity is the kind of thing
needed to help drive the industry forward, followed by
vendors implementing these standards across their
equipment," says Jeff Pulver, president and CEO of
pulver.com, an Internet telephony consultancy.
Pulver sees the OSP as a sign that people understand
there needs to be some commonality in the Internet
telephony industry. "That the OSP will support call
detail records (CDR) across providers is a sign that
people are listening," he adds.
Pulver now is in the process of completing a
memorandum of understanding (MoU) under which
211 Internet telephony providers and vendors agree
on a common CDR that all supporting gateway
vendors would incorporate in their systems.
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