Peerio - another day, another partner

W.C. Fields once famously said that, in future, wars should be fought personally by national leaders using socks filled with manure. Being VON week in Boston, the IP communication industry's weapon of choice is the press release, and the salvos are flying, but the contents are considerably more substantial: two interesting releases from Nimcat in as many days, a blockbuster release from Peerio yesterday on global numbering (message - "you will be assimilated"), and now another piece in the Peerio strategy revealed.

Today Popular Telephony announced that it has signed up Stealth Communications (www.stealth.net) as a partner. Stealth, a major global peering agent, launched Voice Peering Fabric back in April of this year, and at that time had on board Free World Dialup, Net2Phone, Packet8, Addaline, Acropolis, MIT and Yale University as part of the VPF peering agreement. The list has since grown significantly, and now includes minnows like Musimi (now part of Telio) and a giant in the form of China Telecom (http://www.thevpf.com/index.php?action=display_participants).

While the VPF infrastructure acts as agent for IP voice traffic peering, the business also has what it claims is the world's first commercially available ENUM database. Today's agreement will in theory allow Peerio/VPF to cross-map ENUM and Peerio's GNUP numbering plan, opening the door to the kind of seamless interoperability between platforms which underpins the GNUP plan. Yesterday's GNUP announcement was the vision, and this appears to be the first stage towards making it reality. Given the widespread range of ENUM initiatives underway, things could get really interesting (http://www.centr.org/kim/enum/index.html#43), and it's only Tuesday!