Level 3 Communications Inc.

Introduced (3)VoIP Toll Free service: “a toll-free calling service across the United States, rounding out its local and long distance voice over Internet protocol offerings.”

Antone Gonsalves, E-BUSINESS: Level 3 Rounds Out VoIP Offerings, Internetweek.com, January 13, 2004, http://www.internetweek.com/e-business/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17300739 Links to an external site.

Level 3 sells services to carriers, who then offer VoIP and data services to their customers.

Uses softswitch networking technology to convert voice signals from the PSTN to IP packets and conversely converts packets to voice signals when a call is routed to the public switched network.

Transcript

[slide55] And to interconnect operators together, I mentioned Level 3, they sell services to carriers. Here in Sweden, there's another company doing that, Telia, has a service where they basically provide interconnects for other carriers. And one of the exciting things that's happening there, some of you may know that as of this spring, there's no longer an extra charge that can be charged for roaming within Europe for voice calls. So it's supposed to be as if it's one market, I can go anywhere and my voice call costs me the same as if I'm here in Sweden. So let's say I go to Germany and I make a call to someone else from here in Sweden who's also in Germany. What happens to that call in a traditional telephony system? It goes from Germany to Sweden, goes back to Germany. Anyone see a problem with that? Well, when I could charge more for it, I said to the customer, hey, this is really expensive, you're making this call, it's an international call, we get to charge you lots of money. But if I don't get to charge for roaming, I don't want to have that extra cost, right? So the technique today is I want to do so-called local breakout where I want to deliver this call to this other user even though they're using a different operator's mobile network. And I want to do that all within Germany. Why? Because it's cheaper for me. So it's called local breakout. But this actually turns out to be a hard problem. Why is it such a hard problem? Well, all the signaling and authorization had to go back to Sweden where my home operator was, right? Because they're the ones who knew me and I have my account there. But the media traffic could go directly, hey, it looks like voice over IP. But it turns out there's a lot of problems with this. So there's a very nice master's thesis from a year ago talking about the problems in this. And one of the most difficult problems is: the problem with lawful intercept. Because these calls never went back to Sweden. And so someone who had a warrant from a court who went to my operator and said, you have to give us the traffic to and from his phone, what happens? That was only signaling traffic. The actual contents of the call only went there. They have to say, sorry, we don't actually have any of that traffic. We can't give it to you. So even though you have a lawful order to force us to do that, and even though we're his network provider, sorry, we don't have any of the traffic. So a really interesting problem.