Orange Business (news) [a subsidiary of France Telecom (NYSE:FTE, news, filings)] has expanded its Telepresence Community via an interoperability agreement with Tata Communications (news, filings)‘s Global Meeting Exchange. The deal will allow customers of each carrier to conduct Telepresence meetings across the two combined networks. Tata has been one of the most geographically expansive implementers of telepresence, with 33 public rooms across 17 countries and five continents, so the deal materially expands Orange’s reach for the service. One of Orange’s customers, oil engineering and services firm Technip, beta tested the inter-exchange service with one of its business partners who happens to be a Tata customer.
Interconnection between carrier services is a critical piece of the puzzle for telepresence, and so far there seems to be some willingness to work together on it even amongst rivals – last year, BT and AT&T entered into a similar interconnection agreement. Exchanges of various types have been a hot topic lately, I wonder if we will at some point see the rise of independent, neutral telepresence exchanges or whether this will always be dominated by direct connections by big players.
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Categories: ILECs, PTTs · telepresence
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If Telepresence just runs on IP, why is there need to for special peerings in place?
need for speed?
If it was simple (like it should be!), everybody would have it figured out and we’d all be using affordable HQ TP today.
To Rob’s last point in the article, Telx has operated a video exchange platform running inside our 60 Hudson, NY facility 18 months now. Essentially, it’s a custom ethernet exchange for handling TP and HD videoconferencing traffic from multiple carriers, MSPs and enterprise customers. It handles the more complex work of QoS, network addressing, and security for interconnecting TP networks at Layer 2. It is a neutral platform (and end-user equipment agnostic) and it resides inside our core interconnection center where over 300 carriers are located one cross connect away. I expect continued growth and participation among SPs b/c it enables a much larger market (and helps fill big network pipes with dense HD “connections”).
They are using MPLS based IP-VPNs not the Internet. Hence, there has to be an inter-connect in place to transfer the traffic to any other SP.
Essentially each exchange point is an SBC (Session Border Controller) – it’s not just an NNI. Typically there will also be some level of integration between scheduling platforms, particularly where public rooms are involved.
I’m intrigued that when these interconnects are announced, they’re always written as if one company or the other instigated it (perhaps driven by who wrote the PR?).