TransNexus, founded in 1997, is a commercial company providing software products for managing peering among VoIP networks. VoIP Peering is a concept that has grown from the practice of peering IP data networks.
Evolution of VoIP Peering In the beginning of the Internet, IP networks interconnected through public peering points such as Metropolitan Area Ethernet (MAE) East located on Washington DC or MAE West located in San Francisco. These public peering points soon became overwhelmed by the growing amount of data traffic being exchanged between IP networks. To address this problem, private data network operators began to privately interconnect (peer) their networks.
As VoIP technology developed, it was first deployed as a technology to bypass toll charges of the long distance telephone networks or Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). VoIP networks were stand alone networks interconnected only with the PSTN. VoIP peering, however, is the growing practice of directly interconnecting VoIP networks.
TransNexus, along with Cisco, 3Com and others was the creator of the ETSI Open settlement protocol (OSP). The OSP protocol is global standard for enabling secure peer to peer VoIP routing and accounting without the need of an intermediary device, such as a proxy, session border controller or Back to Back User Agent (B2BUA), in the VoIP signaling path. OSP peering is a general technique which may be used for any VoIP protocol (i.e. H323, SIP or IAX) and other IP communication transactions such as video, file sharing or short messaging.