VoIP COALITION FORMING TO PREEMPT REGULATION

“More and more [VoIP providers] are getting along trying to find solutions without subjecting these issues to regulations,” a VON Coalition spokeswoman said. The ad hoc group is composed of both new and established players, including AT&T Consumer Services, 8x8, BroadSoft, Callipso, DialPad, iBasis, Intel, ITXC, Level 3 Communications, Level 3 Enhanced Services, PointOne, PingTone, Telic, Pulver.com/Free World Dialup and the VON Coalition. The spokeswoman said she expected the number of members to grow to about 40: “We want to get a core group of companies committed to working toward the goals of the coalition. We are looking for quality, not for quantity.”

The goal of the new coalition is to “show VoIP as a force for increased competition, a platform for innovation and a driver of broadband deployment,” the spokeswoman said: “It’s not saying ‘no’ to regulation, but asking not to apply traditional telecom regulations to VoIP because it’s a different animal.” She said the coalition would urge the FCC to “assert its jurisdiction over” VoIP and approach it applying the “do not harm” principle. She said “everything at the FCC takes awhile,” so the coalition intended to “work together as an industry” and address the issues “from a technological point of view.” The spokeswoman said the coalition members planned to submit recommendations to the FCC and other agencies and “educate the press and policymakers.” But she said: “We are not a standards body, we'll leave that to engineers.”

Speaking at an FCC forum last week, Evslin urged the Commission to “refrain from applying traditional telecom regulation to VoIP.” He conceded that there were some social policy issues where the FCC and state regulators had a “legitimate role” but said the coalition was prepared to “work constructively” with the Commission and others on key social policy issues.

Evslin said the VoIP industry had a track record of voluntarily addressing social policy issues: (1) On disability access, he said VoIP providers had undertaken to develop and implement technology that was interoperable with TTY devices. (2) On access to emergency services, Evslin said VoIP industry representatives had been working with the National Emergency Number Assn. (NENA) VoIP/Packet Technical Committee and VoIP Operations Committee to develop 911 solutions, and already had announced an agreement to develop the technical and operational mechanisms for providing access to emergency services (CD Dec 2 p1).

(3) On compliance with CALEA, Evslin said manufacturers and VoIP providers also were moving ahead to implement compliance capabilities into their systems. “CALEA has a different definition of telecommunications than the Communications Act, so there is no need to define VoIP as telecommunications for Communications Act purposes in order to mandate that VoIP manufacturers and service providers cooperate with law enforcement,” he said. (4) On universal service, Evslin urged the Commission to reform funding for explicit Universal Service Fund (USF), arguing that a number- based contribution mechanism would ensure the continued sustainability of USF better than any attempt to include VoIP in the current revenue-based mechanism. (5) On intercarrier compensation, Evslin urged the FCC to move toward a “rational series of voluntary intercarrier business arrangements” with regulation required only when there was effective monopoly ownership of a bottleneck: “'Bill and keep’ may well turn out to be an effective arrangement as it has been in much of the IP world.”

Meanwhile, the Network Reliability & Interoperability Council (NRIC) made several recommendations to the FCC and the industry on VoIP late last week. “It’s evident the ENUM [electronic numbering] technology is still evolving, as is its deployment and support infrastructure,” said Cliff Naughton of the NRIC working group on interoperability: “The industry is making progress on resolution of many outstanding issues.” NRIC made the following recommendations for the FCC: (1) The govt. should continue to encourage, support and participate in ENUM deployment at the technical interchange level. (2) The U.S. should formally opt in to the e164.arpa global public ENUM domain name system. (3) Govt. and industry should work together to assign responsibility for administration of the subdomains of 1.e164.arpa corresponding to N. American Numbering Plan (NANP) and U.S. telephone numbers. The Tier 1 Registries for Country Code 1 should be identified, and processes for managing such data established. (4) Providers implementing alternative deployments to the e164.arpa public ENUM should ensure that their deployments provided methods for maintaining the synchronization of their data with the public ENUM and the LNP database, as well as other applicable number portability databases in the public switched telephone network (PSTN). (5) Providers implementing authoritative DNS server for ENUM domains should provide those servers according to Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) best current practices.

For the industry, NRIC recommended: (1) PSTN functionality of call control protocols within industry bodies such as IETF & SIP Forum should be addressed. (2) Call control architectures such as Packet Tandem and PacketCable should be prepared to open those networks for direct interconnect to other IP networks as they evolve using standard signaling protocols. (3) The industry needed to evolve voice over wireless that addressed a common IP platform that supports end-to-end connectivity and interoperability. (4) The operational and standards bodies should investigate the possibility of creating a standardized inter-domain quality of service (QoS) metric data interchange format. For example, NRIC said, the extended Real-Time Control Protocol from the IETF could be employed to report on loss and delay variation between service provider and/or enterprise-controlled VoIP gateways. “Further work is needed for the harmonization of QoS specifications for wireline networks… and those for wireless networks,” it said. (5) The Standards Development Organizations should finish their work on TTY transmission on VoIP networks. “This is currently work-in-progress, with an expectation of completion within 12 months,” NRIC said.