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15/03/2021 - Fuse 2

The last few years Fuse2 have seen rapid growth in their business. With International Points of Presence across the globe they can offer hosted PBX and SIP trunk customers a plethora of services that include international inbound numbers. The company has invested heavily in automation and their portal provides 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 of covid lockdowns has led to continued strong business growth and the need to expand network capacity.

The extension of their UK network footprint provided some logistical headaches. How to manage a customer base growing both in size and geographic spread? Connections to Microsoft teams Direct Routing customers came through a set of Ribbon SWe Lite Session Border Controllers. Their core network also used Ribbon technology but was in need of higher capacity 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.

Fuse2 called in Netaxis Solutions. One of Europe’s leading telecoms systems integrators and software houses Netaxis work with some of the world’s biggest telco brand names to develop and implement robust and highly scalable network infrastructure.

A network design employing a combination of Netaxis’ Session Routing Engine and the Ribbon SBC Core was chosen. SRE was perfect for Fuse 2’s needs because:


● It allows all routing to be governed centrally
● Reads from an external database that not only allows Fuse 2 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 Fuse 2’s own automated provisioning platform
● FUSE 2 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.


The Ribbon SBC Core is one of the best Session Border Controllers on the market and is designed for highly scalable cloud based operation. SBC Core operates on a virtual machine and can be run from multiple datacentres providing the ultimate in geographic distribution and resilience.
The SRE and SBC Core together form a best in class pairing to provide the ultimate in network security and functionality and nicely complement the use of SWe lite SBCs at the customer interface.

Fuse 2 CTO Wayne Mills-Kidals 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.
FUSE 2 is proud to make sure spoofed or untraceable calls are not possible across our network.”
If you want to know more about the FUSE 2 investment in network capacity expansion get in touch at [email protected]

Fuse 2 are now the official range holder of all iHub numbers. If you have any information regarding legacy iHub services please get in touch +44 330 088 0333

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