Does interconnect voice still matter?

The revolution that has overtaken the telecommunications industry these last 2+ decades has been incredibly innovative and, simultaneously, destructive.

It’s laid waste to hundreds of telecommunications companies that no longer exist. Where did you go MCI?

In the U.S. many point to the passing of the landmark 1996 Telecommunications act as the moment when this revolution began.  It ushered in massive competition. Combined with the technological advances (and cost reductions) that VoIP brought to bear, the industry took off and has never looked back.

New business models were created to replace the old ones. New ways of delivering voice telecommunications were invented and distributed.   

Through it all, with all the aforementioned technological and commercial advances, one component of the industry has persisted, voice interconnect.  Sure, that term is relatively new (5-7 years old), but you might remember it by one of its legacy monikers, “Wholesale voice” or “Off-net voice”.

Yes, despite all the advances made, interconnect voice still exists and it still matters. Why? Well, because no single company owns a network that goes to every country or every phone in the world.  So, carriers need terminating partners for calls that leave their network (aka go “off-net”).  That is the fundamental reason that interconnect voice still matters.  Once you realize you need to interconnect with terminating network partners, you will also need to run down the checklist of everything required to do in order to send calls to your terminating partners.

This checklist includes:

• Contracts

• Pricing

• CDR Processing

• Routing

• Reporting

• Alarming, etc….

The list can seem a mile long sometimes because, the fact is, interconnect voice is complex and it is critical to the day-to-day operations of a carriers voice business.  Carriers have to do it, they have to do it well, and as far as anyone can see into the future, they are going to have to keep doing it!