As operators ramp up their HD and LTE services and look towards roaming, there are rising opportunities for providers of IPX peering. iBasis of The Netherlands is one such provider, and this week it has announced deals with Chunghwa of Taiwan and Nordic carrier TeliaSonera.
In the former pact, Chunghwa and iBasis will create a multiservice IPX peering connection to provide IP-based services, initially HD Voice and later VoLTE, LTE roaming and SMS. To resolve interoperability challenges, the firms said they would cooperate to provide all necessary transcoding between wideband and narrowband codecs.
Chunghwa president TG Leng said: ‘In line with the launch of Taiwan’s LTE in 2014, we have scheduled to have our voice, data and mobile roaming traffic migrated to the IPX network and to provide IP traffic transit for carriers in Taiwan’.
Meanwhile, Telia’s international carrier division has signed an LTE roaming peering deal with iBasis. The two companies plan to interconnect their Diameter signalling and data hubs to enable interoperability and a consistent user experience for TeliaSonera’s roaming 4G subscribers.
They will also migrate all legacy services to a new IPX interconnect with a view to providing QoS, security, multilateral connectivity and cascading payments, the operator said in its statement. iBasis’s LTE Signaling eXchange (LSX) service, part of the IPX interconnect, provides a single point of access to the international LTE Diameter signalling network. The LSX ensures that TeliaSonera’s LTE customers receive connectivity worldwide and access to a global footprint of LTE operator networks.
‘As soon as users experience higher quality, they demand it. There will be no going back and we see a growing user requirement to do everything on their mobile devices from anywhere they want ‘ in short, ‘anywhereization’,’ said Erik Hallberg, president of TeliaSonera International Carrier.
The recent merger of Syniverse and Mach has created a formidable leader in IPX roaming hubs for LTE and IP carriers, but the area has other strong competitors, such as Comfone. And firms like iBasis (part of Dutch telco KPN), which previously had a narrower remit, are expanding to meet the LTE challenge. iBasis launched its LTE Signalling Exchange last year.
Meanwhile, wholesale carrier BICS has announced the first intercontinental LTE roaming connection, between Swisscom and South Korean operators, using its IPX platform. This will be extended to customers in Canada and Hong Kong within a couple of weeks.
Marc Furrer, head of international roaming at the Swiss carrier, said in a statement: ‘We have not only taken the lead in expanding 4G/LTE in Switzerland … we are proud of having enabled Europe’s first intercontinental roaming relation because it shows our ability to innovate.’