Netaxis Session Routing Engine – Simple Automation
Simplicity and automation support FUSE2's accelerating business
Fuse2 Communications are a long standing Netaxis customer offering both wholesale and retail voip services in the UK. They have POPs in a number of countries and offer their hosted PBX and SIP trunk customers international inbound numbers. The company has invested heavily in automation and their portal provides their customers with the ability to self provision services.
Being one of the first Service Providers in the UK to offer Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams was a real boost to the Fuse 2 business and this, including the growth in home working over the past year has led to strong business growth and the need to expand network capacity.
The extension of their UK network footprint provided some logistical headaches for Fuse2. Their connections to customers came through a set of Ribbon SWe light Session Border Controllers managing connectivity to their Teams Direct Routing customers. Their core network uses higher capacity SWe SBCs.
The management of the routing logic across the different types of SBC was a complex business. The network expansion also came at a time when regulatory body Ofcom had introduced new rules demanding that UK telcos police the presentation of Calling Line Ids. In order to cut down on illegal spam calling using spoofed CLIs the industry is now required to vet calls to prove that the originating numbers are genuinely owned by the calling party.
A network design employing Netaxis’ Session Routing Engine was chosen. SRE was perfect for Fuse2’s needs because:
- It allows all routing to be governed centrally
- Reads from an external database that not only allows Fuse2 to easily maintain their least cost routing policies but also access a register of allowable numbers under the Ofcom rules
- Employs REST APIs that are perfect for integrating the network elements with Fuse2’s own automated provisioning platform
- Fuse2 have a widely distributed international customer base. Centralising the routing on the SRE gave them the ability to sustain a high quality service. SRE managed the signalling but the media path stayed with the local SBC. In other words for an USA in-country call, for example, the SRE manages the signalling but the media path stays in the USA avoiding long latencies caused by tromboning.
Fuse2 CTO Wayne Mills-Kiddals has plenty to say about the outcome of the project.
On the simplicity offered by the system:
SRE integrates into our partner portal with easy APIs. Allowing huge flexibility on how we deliver calls to customers systems.
SRE has seamlessly allowed us to integrate with various systems to provision MS Teams. From buying the number on our portal SRE will allow the customers Teams domain to tag to a call and route to our Teams SBC clusters we have globally.
Customer protection:
Enhanced protection for customers allowing granular time of day routing such as disallowing high value calls outside of their working hours.
Revenue protection:
We can use a single CDR source for all our calls, instead of using multiple streams from different sources. SRE now identifies customers from multi tenant type endpoints (such as Kandy and Teams SWE lites) allowing us to capture call data and bill accurately.
Call Admission Controls provided by SRE lets us place limits on customers across multi tenant systems such as Teams / Kandy. For example if a customer buys 10 teams channels the SRE will limit this in both directions, something which previously was much more difficult with such a dispersed range of endpoints. This is now a simple one line API.
Finally on the regulatory aspect:
We now are more compliant with CLIs ensuring customers are not abusing CLI freedoms. Customers now are strictly using their own numbers and whitelisted numbers (numbers they own on different networks) thus protecting the wider public from spoofing calls.
Fuse2 is proud to make sure spoofed or untraceable calls are not possible across our network.
In the same vein Netaxis are proud to have been able to work with Fuse 2 to automate their systems.
Simplify, automate, accelerate.
