There was a time not too long ago that SIP peering was going to revolutionise the industry. People would peer with one another and through such peering arrangements, customers would always have a choice, and there would always be interconnectivity, and life would be good.

What happened to this dream? As I look out at the SIP providers out there, fewer and fewer peer with other companies, and those that do only seem to peer when it’s immediately, monetarily advantageous.  There’s no peering for the sake of helping the consumer. It’s peering for the sake of helping the provider.  If there’s not enough of a measurable advantage to peering with a provider, it simply isn’t done.

While sites like SIPBroker.com have enormous numbers of providers, some of which are and some of which aren’t open providers, most other sites don’t even intentionally peer with SIPBroker, and only show up on the site because SIPBroker allows anyone to log in and create a proxy listing for his favourite provider.  Some of those listings work. Some don’t. Some are valid. Some are not.

Free World Dialup has this intricate peering system and this complex form to fill out in order to peer with them. We’ve filled their application out twice and received not even something as simple as a ’sorry, we’re not interested’ response. The same for SIPPhone’s peering application.  And many, many others.  The trick being, of course, that with our 400 customers and our currently limited PSTN connectivity, we don’t have anything to offer that they can leverage for marketing purposes.  When our premium services go online, we may then become more attractive, but chances are we’ll just get lost in the shuffle, requiring us to rely on our own more direct methods of peering, and masking the complexity of our actual peering relationships from the customer with some creative server hacks.
Will peering see a resurgence as more and more VoIP users become active over time, or will the increased VoIP customer base cause companies to follow a more closed scenario, relying on the tried and true telecom methods of making switching to another provider difficult to maintain a customer base? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.