FCC Takes Away Intercarrier Compensation

 The Federal Communication Commission (FCC), the US regulatory authority, reduces telco’s compensation for handing over telephone calls to each other, beginning December 2011. Over a period of seven-to-nine years, the intercarrier compensation will be decreased to zero. Stopping the interest for the session peering of calls, will hopefully give us new and better telephone services and the benefits of reliability and  bandwidth of global IP networks.  Read more at TelcoExchange

The regulation is not surprising. All telcos are moving over to IP networks, using Voice over IP (VoIP) technology instead of the old Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN), but the structure of handling the calls between telco carriers has remained. A major reason is the regulated compensation a carrier gets for taking over a telephone from the calling side to the called side.

With today’s IP networks, it would be much better to send the call over a global IP network directly to the called party. That would not only cost less, but also allow modern telephony services with better voice quality, video, instant messaging (IM) and presence information. Today’s century-old Plain Old Telephony Service (POTS) has not even reached AM radio voice quality, while all other functions in society have developed incredibly.

The use of local IP – only within each carrier domain - then peering old-fashoned way (session peering instead of IP-peering) between carriers has even reduced the quality of the old POTS. The service that has been most negatively affected is fax, where international fax traffic is failing heavily.

News

Press

Internet+ Cover Story in Internet Telephony Magazine, June 2012.

The SIP Trunk Expert about Internet+: SIP Trunking Your Unified Communication.

Summary of upcoming cover story about Internet+ in Internet Telephony Magazine, June 2012.

It was crowded at Ingate's 3 day SIP Trunk-UC Seminar when Internet+ was presented February 1st, 2012.

Intertex and Ingate presenting the Internet+ model at ITEXPO in Miami 1-3 February 2012.