CHICAGO--Global Crossing today announced the latest in a series of enhancements to its business and wholesale product lines, including a VoIP Community Peering feature that mimics wireless on-net calling plans and improved Virtual Private Networking performance.

The VoIP Community Peering feature allows business partners who use Global Crossing’s network to make calls for free without having to create a private number dialing plan.

“Subscribers to our On-Net Plus or VoIP Outbound calling services can reduce their costs by up to 60%,” said Anthony Christie, chief marketing officer for Global Crossing. “This could also be the precursor to service provider peering.”

Depending on the reaction to its VoIP Community Peering service, Global Crossing could partner with other service providers to offer customers free on-net calling across networks, he said.

The VPN enhancements include one for Global Crossing’s wholesale customers and two for its retail customers.

For wholesale customers, Global Crossing now offers improved IP VPN connectivity through iMPLS Option B, which uses the Internet Engineering Task Force’s RFC 2547 specification to allow service providers to interconnect to its network and maintain Class of Service and Quality of Service transparency.

“This allows secondary and tertiary service providers to connect to our network and get a global, industry specified, secure and scaleable network,” Christie said.

Another enhancement, Enhanced Multi-link Point to Point Protocol (MLPPP), is aimed at retail customers and allows them to support multiple types of CoS, to improve network performance and make network design more flexible.

“Today, a customer might have half a T-1 sitting vacant because that T-1 supports a premium application,” Christie explained. “This service allows them to use the other half without affecting the premium service,” by assigning a different CoS to the second service.

Compressed Real-time Transport Protocol is the third enhancement, and it conserves bandwidth by compressing the header of a message, in addition to existing services, which compress the payload, and thus reduce access costs.