Arbinet Extends its Global Number Portability Service with NetNumber

Arbinet Extends its Global Number Portability Service with NetNumber

Successful Interworking with NetNumber’s Service Bureau

Provides Global Number Portability Correction Services to Broad Range of Carriers

New Brunswick, NJ, USA – October 7, 2009– Arbinet Corporation [Nasdaq: ARBX], a leading wholesale telecommunications service provider, today announces the extension of its Global Number Portability Service to the customers of NetNumber, Inc., the world’s leading provider of next-generation addressing and routing technology. Arbinet’s Global Number Portability Databases will enable NetNumber’s many carrier customers to better leverage NetNumber’s market-leading TITAN routing database platform. Arbinet has been managing its number portability databases for over two years, and as the sponsor of GlobalNumberPortability.Org is a proven leader in this space. Arbinet currently manages 100M queries a month against its platform for its customers. By partnering with NetNumber, Arbinet can further extend its service to a broader range of carriers, mobile operators and messaging providers as a natural step to improving global call routing and quality. 

Number Portability, while providing many benefits to the consumer, introduces considerable complexity into the International Call Termination marketplace. Traditionally, carriers and service providers have relied on in-country carriers to correctly route the voice call or SMS/MMS message to the appropriate mobile network, but the increasing percentage of ported numbers and the extra costs associated with rerouting a call to the correct network are straining those commercial arrangements. Network Portability is currently available in over 52 countries worldwide with many more expected to enable portability in the next few years. 

Arbinet is a proven leader of Global Portability information, having launched its Global Number Portability Service directly to its own customers in 2008. The service enables carriers to query a database during the call set-up process. The query returns the identity of the mobile service provider supporting that number. The carrier then uses that information to correctly route calls to the terminating service provider, saving transit fees and improving the quality of service. The call itself is carried on the normal interconnection with the appropriate mobile service provider. In providing this service to the marketplace, Arbinet can handle any query protocol, enabling easy interworking with both traditional and next generation VoIP based switches. Both the Arbinet and NetNumber services have been proven to interwork with the majority of traditional and next generation switches available globally, including SONUS, Veraz, Genband, Siemens, Ericsson and Cisco. In addition, Arbinet’s AxcessCode™, a full definition of the world’s numbering plan, is embedded to provide an appropriate response to any query.  

Through its partnership with NetNumber, Arbinet can improve global call routing and quality by extending its portability service to a broader range of customers. The majority of US mobile operators use NetNumber technology to enable accurate interconnect routing of MMS and SMS messages. Following extensive interoperability and stress testing, NetNumber has now added access to Arbinet’s Global Number Portability Databases to the TITAN platform and is live in production with the first commercial customer. Together, Arbinet and NetNumber now offer full portability correction services in the following countries: USA, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, Germany and Brazil.

"We are pleased to further enhance the high-level of service currently available to Arbinet customers through our partnership with NetNumber,” states Steve Heap, Chief Technology Officer for Arbinet. “Now we can increase quality of service while reducing customer costs. Arbinet was one of the first companies to recognize the problems that portability introduces into International Communications and, as a result, Arbinet added capabilities into its advanced call routing platform to help solve these issues.”

Doug Ranalli, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of NetNumber, Inc. continues, “We have a long history of successful innovations with Arbinet from the early days of VoIP peering and the launch of the SPIDER registry solution. This partnership allows us to offer a broader range of capabilities to our own customers who are looking for efficient and accurate routing solutions.”

Arbinet’s voice termination and origination options include thexchange, the industry’s leading marketplace for buying and selling voice communications; Carrier Services, a traditional wholesale model; and Private Exchange^SM, an easy, low-risk outsourcing approach to voice trading; each of these Arbinet offerings is capable of handling portability correction. For more information, please visit www.arbinet.com or e-mail [email protected]. 

About Arbinet

Arbinet is a leading provider of international voice and IP solutions to carriers and service providers globally. With more than 1100 carriers across the world connected to the Arbinet Network, Arbinet combines global scale with sophisticated platform intelligence, call routing and industry leading credit management and settlement capabilities. Customers and suppliers include many leading fixed line, mobile, wholesale and VoIP carriers as well as calling card, ISPs and content providers around the world who buy and sell voice and IP telecommunications capacity and content. The company can be reached at its corporate headquarters in New Brunswick, NJ, at +1.732.509.9100 or by email at [email protected].

NetNumber is a leading provider of next-generation, ENUM, SIP, SS7/C7 and SIGTRAN converged addressing and routing technology to the global communications industry. The NetNumber TITAN server is licensed and deployed by many of the world’s largest mobile operators and fixed-line carriers as an addressing and routing database solution for both TDM and IP-based voice services, messaging services, number-portability services and least-cost routing services. The highly-scalable TITAN Master/Edge architecture provides carriers/operators with a centralized infrastructure for managing addressing and routing data for use by multiple network applications. Additional information is available at www.netnumber.com.  

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain forward-looking statements regarding anticipated future revenues, growth, capital expenditures, management’s future expansion plans, expected product and service developments or enhancements, discussions of strategy, and future operating results. Various risks and uncertainties may cause Arbinet’s actual results to differ materially. Please refer to Part I, Item 1A of the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 16, 2009, and other filings that have been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Arbinet assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise and such statements are current only as of the date they are made.