Industry Forums Facilitating the VoIP Migration Process

Ensuring the same high QoS afforded by legacy TDM-based communications infrastructure is a key concern for carriers looking to migrate to VoIP. With the overall goal of providing clear guidance to facilitate worldwide IP adoption and interconnection among carriers, standards groups and industry forums are working to devise common metrics as well as discuss industry-wide issues as they are encountering them.

For example, the i3 Forum, comprised of more than 38 telecommunications providers representing a combined retail base in excess of 1.5 billion customers in over 100 countries, provides recommendations of specifications based on existing standards, which can be used by international wholesale carriers for migration of voice services to IP technology and IP-based multimedia services.

This year, the i3 Forum is working with a fax-over IP forum to resolve deployment and interoperability challenges posed by next-generation fax communications while bringing equipment vendors and service providers together in the process. Collaborating to test, verify and look for potential weaknesses that would impair quality is illustrative of the telecom community working together to not only better address FoIP technology issues, but to speed the deployment of an all-IP world.

Aside from the i3 Forum, the FAS (False Answer Supervision) Forum was developed to proactively combat FAS and ensure quality over an IP interconnection.

About the author:

Michael Corso
Product Manager - VoIPLink TM -- Tata Communications
Michael Corso is the Product Manager Product Manager – VoIPLinkTM for Tata Communications. With over a decade of experience in the VoIP industry, Mr. Corso is responsible for overseeing the capabilities, features and strategy for VoIP based interconnects over the Tata Communications voice network. In this capacity he is driving the NGN network integration and facilitates the migration from TDM to VoIP. Mike is also active within industry forums and events and has been the chair of the operations workstream for the i3 Forum over the last two years.