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9.1 Panorama of Main VoIP Service Providers

Voice over IP (VoIP) should not be considered as a disruptive service1 since it fundamentally does not oer the user any dierence in service than before; in particular, compared to the old PSTN (Public Switched Telephony Network), for instance. IP networks, however, have the advantage of making it easier to combine basic voice services with advanced features, such as Instant Messaging (IM), le sharing, video communications, and more. This generates a major opportunity for competitors to enter the market with relatively little cost and minimal risk involved. By taking a holistic view of the VoIP business we can identify the following three main types of actors.2 Incumbent Service Providers Virtual VoIP Service Providers Proprietary Third-Party VoIP Service Providers In Figure9.1, dierent operators and VoIP solutions are mapped in relation to how standardized technologies are used and on what level they are implemented with reference to the infrastructure that they require. The incumbent operators own their entire infrastructure and use standardized protocols (e.g., SIP (Session Initiation Protocol, 3), RTP (Real-Time Transport Protocol,4), etc.), whereas the proprietary clients (see Figure 9.1) focus only on the highest OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) layers with a pure application solution and they own none of the service and network infrastructures. Virtual VoIP Service Providers resemble MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) that we have already seen in the mobile world. Virtual VoIP Service Providers, for example, only implement some
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Incumbent Operators

Standardized

Virtual VoIP Operators AOL Nuvio Parla US 1 Touch Tone Enterprise Virtual VoIP Services No Network Infrastructure Fring MSN Gizmo 5 Yahoo Amivox Google Talk Skype Nimbuzz

British Telecom Telia Sonera France Telecom T-mobile etc. Siminn

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Owns Network Infrastructure

Hutchison Skype

Co-operational arrangement between incumbent and 3rd party clients

Proprietary

3rd Party Proprietary Clients

Figure 9.1 Classication of different VoIP actors. (Inspired by Verkasalo, H. 2006. Emerging Trends in the Mobile VoIP Business. Helsinki, Finland: Helsinki University of Technology. Online at http://www.netlab.tkk./opetus/s383042/2006/papers_pdf/C3.pdf5)

billing and charging mechanisms, but do not own any of the network or service infrastructures themselves. Therefore, these functions have to be achieved owing to appropriate cooperation agreements with one or several underlying Network Providers (see Section 9.3.4).
9.1.1  Incumbent Operators

Telephone Service Providers or telephone operators have for many years delivered exactly the core service that is most crucial for most customersvoice. Therefore, for most users, the means of transport is not as important as many other things, e.g., the perceived quality of the connection, user reachability, seamless mobility, and many others. Most telephony operators own the network and service infrastructures and, therefore, are in an ideal situation to oer this kind of service and to widen their product selection.

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Earlier on, telecom operators looked at new radio technologies as a threat to their current services and took a slightly defensive approach, but nowadays operators, like for example Hutchison 3G, have realized that these solutions bring them new exciting opportunities that givetheir customers more freedom and support the horizontal growth of the incumbent operator. The main advantage that incumbent operators have is that, rstly, they already have the network in place, not to mention a huge customer base enabling them to make the paradigm shift toward VoIP. Secondly, they have experience in roaming and interoperability arrangements which is extremely valuable for this type of business. If operators are already oering a mobile telephone service, they have yet another advantage that the third-party proprietary Service Providers and the Virtual VoIP Operators will not be able to oera realistic approach toward Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). One of the important aspects of FMC is that it can be seen as a catalyst to deploy services that are not bound to a given access technology. A service then can be engineered without assumption on the network access used to reach the service (e.g., some implicit authentication schemes will be abandoned in favor of service-centric schemes). In order to a make seamless handover from a cellular network to, for instance, a WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) network inside an oce building or at home, the Service Provider would have to have full control of both service sides. This means that without some sort of cooperation and coordination with the mobile Service Providers neither the virtual VoIP Operators nor the third-party proprietary Service Providers will be able to oer this type of service.
9.1.2  Virtual VoIP Operators

Virtual VoIP Operators are similar to MVNOs, which are known from the mobile cellular business. Virtual VoIP Operators own no physical infrastructure, but oer services through cooperational arrangements over the network and service infrastructures of another operator. Virtual Operators possibly implement billing, charging, and some interface to sell the service to new customers. Some virtual Operators even function almost entirely through a Web site and, therefore, need only a minimal sta.

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The main advantage for Virtual Operators is that they can start operation very quickly with minimal cost and thereby minimize any business risk strategically. Thus, they leverage on the Internet business model and established standards such as IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) or SIP and available hardware2 and can maintain lean growth in proportion to the number of new customers. The downside is, of course, their dependency on the network operator, which inhibits the virtual operator from growing vertically with new services and customer products. The fact that they do not have any control of the network and service infrastructure also gives them very little negotiation power when it comes to roaming and interoperability with other Service Providers, which is very important in the long run.
9.1.3  Proprietary Third-Party VoIP Service Providers

As previously mentioned, VoIP is not a new technology and has existed for many years. From Chapter 10, it can be seen that dierent users have dierent demands based on how they use the service, for example, when it comes to cost versus quality, usability, reachability, standards, integration with enterprise systems, etc. Third-party proprietary Service Providers focus only on the highest layer in the OSI model by providing a pure application solution to establish client-to-client communications through the Internet. Skype is probably the best known example of this type of service and the one that has gained the most popularity. Other players in this category may include some of the Internet giants like Microsoft MSN, Google talk, Yahoo Voice!, and others. For these Service Providers, the business model is very dierent and is based generally on getting the biggest user domain. Their income is then mainly based on advertisements or on value-adding services, such as PC-to-mobile transaction services (e.g., SkypeOut service oering), voicemails, le sharing, video communication, and others. This type of operator shares most of the same advantages and disadvantages as the Virtual Operators even though their way of operation is very dierent.

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The proprietary Service Providers usually oer voice services, which, in many cases, would be considered unacceptable for the enterprise market in relation to security, quality, special enterprise services, technical support, and interoperability issues with other Internet services and PSTN/cellular networks, etc., and which are, therefore, more likely to gain added success in the private market. Note that some services belonging to this category are forbidden in some enterprise networks and administrations. The main reason is security threats and avoiding channels such as entertainment varieties that are not work related.
9.2 C  ooperation Agreements between Dierent Types of VoIP Service Providers

While the threat from the free-oering proprietary clients still remains, some Operators look at this inevitable development as an opportunity to take an active part in the development instead of trying to ght it. Hutchison 3G is one of the best examples of this approach. They have made cooperational agreements with Skype to begin selling Skypeenabled mobile phones to their customers. This, of course, will mean that their business focus shifts more in the direction of value-adding services, such as SkypeOut, le sharing, and more.5 Instant Messaging clients for mobile phones is another service that is rapidly gaining popularity and some have already begun to oer voice telephony services from client-to-client, run on a mobile device, or even client-to-mobile by using a SkypeOut or similar solutions. Some examples of these clients are Nimbuzz (nimbuzz.com), Fring (fring.com), and Gizmo5 (giz5.com). The following section provides more details about the identied business actors and relationships when deploying interprovider telephony services.
9.3 Business Actors Involved in VoIP Interconnection

Four business actors have been identied as main actors involved in the delivery of interprovider VoIP services. Dedicated business relationships are used to allow interaction between involved business actors. More details about these actors and business relationships are described in the following.

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9.3.1  Customer

The Customer role denotes the business entity that subscribes to the service oering delivered by a given Service Provider. A service oering includes several features, such as: (1) unlimited VoIP calls to local destinations, (2) unlimited VoIP calls to international destinations, (3) free roaming, (4) ability to lter incoming calls, (5) support of CLID (Calling Line Identication Display), (6) CLIR (Calling Line Identication Restriction), etc. The subscription to the service is implemented via a dedicated contract denoted as a Service Level Agreement (SLA) (Figure 9.2). This subscription is for the right to use the service. An SLA is a document that species the technical clauses related to the delivery of the subscribed service. The SLA is translated by a given Service Provider to a Service Level Specication (SLS). Particularly, an SLA contract is translated to access control rules and policies, enforced within service nodes attached to the service domain managed by a given Service Provider. This action is required to allow the subscribed Customers to access the oered services when invoking their SLAs. Specically, the device used by the Customer is appropriately congured to access the service. The reachability information (e.g., FQDN (Fully Qualied Domain Name) or an IP address) of the outbound proxy to use when placing calls is to be congured. The conguration of the outbound proxy reachability information can be achieved using DHCP (Dynamic Host Conguration Protocol,6,7) for instance, or any alternative means. In addition, means to invoke the service (or the SLA) are also specied by the Service Provider during the SLA negotiation phase. These means may be implicit or explicit (e.g., issuing dedicated
Customer Service Level Agreement Service Provider

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Figure 9.2 Customer to Service Provider relationship.

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RSVP (Reservation Protocol) requests or logging into a Web page, etc.). Implicit means are reduced to access control policies enforced in the service nodes to which the Customer device is connected. These rules may be coupled with other authentication procedures. For instance, authentication procedures can be enabled to check whether or not a user is allowed to access the service. The delivered service should fulll the clauses detailed in the SLA. A Service Provider should implement service fulllment and assurance functions that are responsible for checking if the services delivered to the subscribed Customers are consistent with what has been subscribed by them in the SLA. The Service Provider should be able to continuously and, preferably in real-time, control the level of its oered services and avoid receiving calls to its hotline (which induces extra costs from an OPEX (Operational Expenditure) perspective). Service and network failures, such as service nodes outage, link failures, degradation of the QoS (Quality of Service) of voice streams, and routing disruption, should be reported to the appropriate desks and action should be undertaken to solve the encountered problem. The problem should be solved (or at least detected and handled) before receiving the complaints from the Customers.
9.3.2  End User

End User denotes the entity that actually invokes the service, owing to a prenegotiated SLA owned by a Customer (Figure 9.3). Generally, End User and Customer entities are used interchangeably. In this book, it is assumed that a Customer is the entity that subscribes to a service oering, which is managed and oered by a Service Provider. End Users are all persons who use the service
End User Delegates Customer

Figure 9.3 Relationship between the End User and the Customer business actors.

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(e.g., members of a family use the services subscribed to by one member of the family). A Customer has the right to invoke the subscribe service to one or several End Users. The identity of End User is not meaningful from a service perspective; only the one of Customer is required. In particular, for legal intercept and data retention purposes, only the identity of the Customer is used. For abuse claims, only the identity of the Customer will be provided to the authorities because the Customer is the entity who is legally responsible of the use of a link or a service. It is up to the Customer to check whether or not End Users are misbehaving. These means are not specied by Service Providers and are left to the judgment of each Customer. For enterprises or universities, a means to log the connected users (e.g., employees, students) may be put in place to identify, in a nonambiguous manner, the suspected user, who may be subject to an abuse claim.
9.3.3  Service Provider

As mentioned above, Service Providers put at the disposal of Customers a service portfolio. This portfolio is a packaging of capabilities resulting from the engineering of a set of resources and equipments. Service Providers administer a set of equipment and servicespecic resources, such as billing means, authentication procedures, and customer proles databases, which interact for the delivery of value-added services. These equipments and resources belong to the Service Provider domain. In the context of IP telephony, a service domain is referred to as an ITAD (IP Telephony Administrative Domain). Service nodes belonging to a Service Provider are interconnected owing to the invocation of connectivity services oered by a Network Provider, as shown in Figure 9.4. Note that the access segment is particularly critical and sensitive since, for instance, the loss of a few ATM frames may induce a failure of an ongoing H.323 call: only 3 frames to 1000 (i.e., 3/1000) may be sucient to avert the establishment of an ongoing H.323 call.

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ITAD

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AS

Figure 9.4 Service Provider to Network Provider relationship.

Service Provider and Network Provider may be managed by the same administrative entity. This mode is denoted as a vertical model because no separation may be enforced between the network and service layer. In a vertical model, a Service Provider may enforce network-related policies to prioritize some of its services. From a service perspective, all VoIP actors identied in Section 9.1 are considered as Service Providers. The way the service is engineered is an internal issue. It is worth mentioning that Customers have dedicated requirements with regards to the delivered services, especially in terms of QoS and/or QoE (Quality of Experience) and availability. Pertinent indicators to let the customer assess the level of its subscribed/delivered services should be provided by the Service Provider owing to the implementation of suitable service assurance functions where indicators, such as MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), MTBR (Mean Time Between Repairs), MTTR (Mean Time To Restore), and one-way delays are put at the disposal of Customers. In order to meet these objectives (i.e., technical clauses included in SLAs), numerous engineering tuning operations are enforced and associated means (e.g., tools, protocols, architectures, etc.) deployed to monitor and measure the outcome of engineered services. In addition, a NOC (Network Operations Center) can be designated to intervene and to solve the experienced degradation or the unavailability of a service.

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Supervision is a critical component in the service management environment and, therefore, in the value creation chain. Supervision aims at providing inputs to operational entities that are in charge of operating and maintaining services. Dedicated organizational and functional structures are to be implemented to eciently monitor and assess the grade of deployed services and also the grade of perceived delivered services by End Users. Appropriate actions are consequently enforced so as to solve encountered problems and then put an altered service back to its normal state. Various tools (e.g., probes, reporting tools, etc.) are to be deployed to provide feedback on the status of running services and potential operational issues. In order to assess the level of operated services to Customers, valid indicators must be dened and their values evaluated. These indicators may be computed in real time or based on recorded data, such as CDRs (Call Data Records). Below is listed a set of valid indicators: Availability of the service. NER (Network Eciency Ratio) and ASR (Answer Eciency Ratio) that are used to compute the ratio of ecient calls. ALOC (Average Length of Call) is used to compute the average duration of calls. PRR (Premature Release Ratio) is used to compute the ratio of sessions that have been prematurely torn down. SCRn (Short Communication Ratio less than n seconds) is used to evaluate the number of calls whose duration is less than n seconds. However, considering the aforementioned issues, and the complexity of deployed networks and services, additional indicators would be useful to assess the overall level of delivered service:8 Session Request Delay (SRD): Dened as the time interval from the rst call setup request containing the necessary information sent by the calling party to the intended mediation or called party until the last bit of the rst provisional response is received indicating an audible or visual status of the initial session setup request.

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Session Disconnect Delay (SDD): Dened as the interval between the rst bit of the sent session completion message and the last bit of the subsequently received successful response. Session Duration Time (SDT). Ineective Session Attempts (ISA): Occur when a proxy or agent internally releases a setup request with a failed or overloaded condition. The output value of this metric is numerical and should be adjusted to indicate a percentage of ineective session attempts. Session Establishment Ratio (SER): This metric is numerical and is adjusted to indicate a percentage of successfully established sessions. Registration Request Delay (RRD): A measurement of the delay in responding to a user agent registration request. RRD is measured and reported only for successful registration requests. RRD is stated in units of milliseconds. Ineective Registration Attempts (IRA) are utilized to detect failures causing an inability for a registration server to receive a registration request. This metric is measured at the originating UA. IRA is reported as a percentage of registration attempts. Some of these indicators do not reect the QoS, but the credibility of reported data. Consequently, these ratios assess the QoS of the overall service from the perspective of those communications from which a CDR has been recorded. This subtlety should be taken into account in order not to reproduce the same practices as for a PSTN.
9.3.4  Network Provider

Network Provider denotes the entity that is responsible for managing and administering a set of resources and capabilities for the delivery of connectivity services. These connectivity services may be IP ones or Layer 2 ones (e.g., ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), GE (Gigabit Ethernet), etc.). For the delivery of added value services, Service Providers use the capabilities of underlying Network Providers. The engineering and

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maintenance of these capabilities belong to the Network Provider. Only service-specic engineering is managed by Service Providers. Furthermore, in order to deliver its services, a given Service Provider may rely on one or several Network Providers capabilities. This relationship is implemented via a dedicated agreement called a Connectivity Provisioning Agreement (CPA). A Network Provider may provide capabilities in distinct segments, such as access, access aggregation, and/or core segments.
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9.4 Business Relationships

The delivery of interprovider IP telephony services relies on the implementation of various agreements between involved actors. These agreements are explained in detail below.
9.4.1  SLA (Service Level Agreement)

As mentioned above, an SLA is the contract agreed between a Customer and a Service Provider. This agreement is a right to invoke the service. Both administrative and technical clauses are detailed in such a document. An SLA may be negotiated between involved parties. Dedicated means to negotiate an SLA may be put at the disposal of Customers. In current practices, mainly for Residential Customers, SLAs are not negotiated, but are frozen by Service Providers. An SLA may dene the scope of delivered services and associated guarantees.
9.4.2  CPA (Connectivity Provisioning Agreement)

To deploy their services, Service Providers rely on underlying capabilities managed by Network Providers. These capabilities are invoked owing to the subscription to dedicated agreements called Connectivity Provisioning Agreements (Figure 9.5). Connectivity means the reachability and transfer capabilities resulting from the interconnection of nodes and activation of resources. A Connectivity Provisioning Agreement denes the scope of the connectivity services and associated guarantees. Moreover,

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Service Provider

Connectivity Provisioning Agreement Network Provider

Figure 9.5 Service Provider to Network Provider relationship.

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Service Provider 1,*

CPA

CPA

CPA

Network Provider

Network Provider

Network Provider

Figure 9.6 Multiple CPAs.

QoS and resilience clauses are dened in a given Connectivity Provisioning Agreement. A given Service Provider may be located in several countries, therefore, CPA agreements with several Network Providers are required to be under contract. Figure 9.6 provides an overview of the business roles and the interactions, while Figure 9.7 sketches an example of the network conguration where one single ITAD is deployed over three Autonomous Systems (ASs). An AS is typically a BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) domain. More information about this is provided in Chapter 8. When both Service Provider and Network Provider refer to the same administrative entity, the CPA interface is not explicit. But, this practice may evolve in Europe if Functional Separation promoted by the European Commission is imposed.

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ITAD

ASa

ASb

ASc

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Figure 9.7 Example of an ITAD deployed over several AS domains.

9.4.3  N IA (Network Interconnection Agreement)

In order to extend the scope of their connectivity services beyond their administrative boundaries, Network Providers activate appropriate means to exchange reachability information and also to provide transfer capabilities to each other. Prior to the exchange of information, a dedicated agreement is negotiated between involved parties. This agreement is called the Network Interconnection Agreement. This agreement may involve Network Providers that act in distinct segments, such as access and core networks or between two Network Providers, which provide transit services (Figure 9.8). Examples of IP NIAs are peering or transit agreements.
9.4.4  SIA (Service Interconnection Agreement)

Similar to NIA, Service Interconnection Agreements may be negotiated between two Service Providers. These agreements are put in place to extend the service scope and deliver the service beyond the single administrative domain of one single Service Provider (Figure 9.9). An SIA should describe the scope of the interconnection service, QoS, resilience, and additional administrative and technical clauses. The format of the SIA is not standardized. Adjacent Service

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Service Provider

Service Interconnection Agreement

Service Provider

Figure 9.8 Network Interconnection Agreement.

Network Provider

Network Interconnection Agreement

Network Provider

Figure 9.9 Service Interconnection Agreement.

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End User Customer Service Level Agreement Service Provider Service Interconnection Agreement

End User Customer Service Level Agreement Service Provider

Connectivity Provisioning Agreement Network Provider

Connectivity Provisioning Agreement Network Provider

Network Interconnection Agreement

Figure 9.10 Overview of Business Actors and Relationships.

Providers are free to enclose in an SIA the clauses they believe to be pertinent to each other. A cost is usually associated with an SIA and should include indicators, such as MTBF, MTBR, MTTR, and oneway delay. In the context of Interprovider IP telephony, the SIA should include the scope of the interconnection: in particular, whether reachable telephony prexes are wildcard or restricted to a set of well-dened prexes, the amount of trac allowed to be exchanged, the ratio of incoming to outgoing trac, the signaling protocol to be used, accepted CODECs, etc.
9.4.5  Conclusion

Figure9.10 summarizes these business actors and required business relationships, which are involved for the delivery of interprovider IP telephony services. Service Providers need to cooperate in order to be able to provide global reachability. This global reachability is provided over the interconnection of various Network Providers.

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References

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1. Barsi, T. 2002. Disruptive technology vs. disruptive applications. Telephony online, at http://telephonyonline.com/news/telecom_disruptive_technology_vs/index.html (accessed July, 2011). 2. Malas, D. and A. Morton. 2010. Basic Telephony SIP End-to-End Performance Metrics. draft-ietf-pmol-sip-perf-metrics (work in progress), September. 3. Rosenberg, J., H. Schulzrinne, G. Camarillo, A. Johnston, J. Peterson, R. Sparks, M. Handley, and E. Schooler. 2002. SIP: Session Initiation Protocol. RFC 3261, June. 4. Schulzrinne, H., S. Casner, R. Frederick, and V. Jacobson. 2003. RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications. STD 64, RFC 3550, July. 5. Verkasalo, H. 2006. Emerging Trends in the Mobile VoIP Business. Helsinki, Finland: Helsinki University of Technology. Online at http://www.netlab.tkk./opetus/s383042/2006/papers_pdf/C3.pdf (accessed October, 2011) 6. Droms, R. 1997. Dynamic Host Conguration Protocol. RFC 2131, March. 7. Droms, R., J. Bound, B. Volz, T. Lemon, C. Perkins, and M. Carney. 2003. Dynamic Host Conguration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6). RFC 3315, July. 8. Blau, J. 2006. 3GSM: Skype, Hutchison 3G partner on VoIP. InfoWorld. com. Online at http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R= printThis&A=/article/06/02/14/75370_HN3gvoip_1.html (accessed July, 2011).