The Voice Peering Fabric (VPF) this week at COMPTEL PLUS is sponsoring a track of sessions exploring various aspects of voice peering.

Today, Shrihari Pandit, president and CEO of Stealth Communications, creator of the VPF, will educate COMPTEL attendees on what the VPF is and how it works.

The VPF, which this year is expected to process more than 100 billion minutes of VoIP traffic, is a service of Stealth. This distributed, Layer 2 Ethernet fabric was designed as an exchange for service providers and enterprise customers to exchange VoIP traffic in a secure, quality-ofservice environment. It allows its members to buy and sell incoming DID and outbound termination services on a wholesale basis. VPF also allows members to buy and sell access to SS7 and TCAP (transaction capabilities application part, a protocol for SS7 networks) services from companies such as INFONXX, SNET DG (now part of AT&T), TNS and VeriSign. Finally, VPF offers an ENUM registry and SRV (service record) registry.

On Tuesday, VPF sessions include a panel on Voice Peering Hardware & Software Elements to help the audience understand how session controllers and media gateways are used to peer voice traffic. Pandit will lead this panel, which includes Dan Dearing, vice president of marketing at NexTone Communications; William Kwan, director of strategic planning at Lucent Technologies Inc.; Chris Lengyel, market development manager at Cantata Technology Inc.; and Jim Majeski, director of systems engineering at Sansay Inc.

Peering exchanges use different architectures to offer their interconnect services, said Dearing of session border controller provider NexTone. The VPF is an example of a provider that focuses on the switching fabric offering ENUM as an additional service. In this environment, the session control intelligence resides in member border elements that connect to the VPF.

A second VPF track panel tomorrow, Transitioning SS7/TCAP and 411 Services to IP, talks about how to control operating costs and simplify networks by eliminating the complexly and costliness of SS7/TDM connections and streamlining access to critical database and gateway services over IP. Presenters on that panel include Doug Hilmes, director of business development at Syniverse Technologies Inc.; Nitin Krishna, director of product development and management at INFONXX Inc.; and Dan Lyman, vice president of sales at Transaction Network Services Inc.

ENUM and least-cost routing is the theme of the third VPF session, which includes Mark Fedor, CTO of SunRocket; John Fitzpatrick, senior vice president of software solutions for Vero Systems Inc.; and Tom Kershaw, vice president of next-generation services at VeriSign.

Cantata Technology Inc. www.cantata.com   INFONXX www.infonxx.com   Lucent Technologies Inc. www.lucent.com NexTone Communications www.nextone.com   Sansay Inc. www.sansay.com Stealth Communications Inc. www.stealth.net   SunRocket Inc. www.sunrocket.com   Syniverse Technologies Inc. www.syniverse.com/content.cfm?section_id=1 Transaction Network Services Inc. www.tnsi.com   VeriSign www.verisign.com   The Voice Peering Fabric http://www.thevpf.com