Re: DUNDi

[Alex Bligh <alex@alex.org.uk>]

--On 21 October 2004 09:51 -1000 Antonio Querubin <tony@aloha.net> wrote:

> Oh come on now - don't need to be so pessimistic :)  If the VOIP community
> feels the delegation of e164.arpa zones continues to proceed at a snail's
> pace, other ad-hoc enum zones will just pop up - they already are.  The
> same type of political pressures and decentralization issues that forced
> the creation of alternate domain registrars and TLDs are already at work.

At the risk of generating a high time coefficient echo:

ENUM, or more precisely ENUM usage in which there is meant to be a
correlation between ENUM representation and "a phone number you can dial on
your POTS phone (*), is ALWAYS going to be tied to the ITU hierarchy (by
which I mean the hierachy of country codes, national numbering authorities
and telcos with block allocations). This is because:
a) by assumption its tree is tied to a number tree the ITU hierarchy
  control - if you I have (POTS) +442088123300 and Randy decides he'd
  quite like 0.0.3.3.2.1.8.8.0.2.4.4.e164.arpa, then either he can't
  have it (in which case you are tied to the ITU-hierarchy) or he
  can (in which case there isn't a correlation between ENUM and
  phone numbers dialed on a POTS phone as calling Randy's ENUM number
  will get him not me).
b) Most (admittedly not all) useful functionality has a two way mapping.
  To achieve this everything in the ENUM tree needs to have its e164
  equivalent in the PSTN routing table - i.e. the market for numbers
  only callable by ENUM is small, and will remain small unless and until
  ENUM is near universal.

Ad-hoc enum zones (alternate roots) are thus of little to no use for the
above purpose UNLESS what they are doing is BETTER tying e164.arpa to e164.

What ENUM should be useful for is (a) facilitating that tying, (b)
technologically enabling reduction of barriers to entry in the e164 system
- this demands a pretty rigorous competition requirement w.r.t. number
portability. See for instance the Swedish presentation at RIPE. And in case
anyone was wondering whether this has an effect on number allocation etc.,
see recent UK OFCOM reviews on the subject.

If you want to use something "alternate" to the ITU hierarchy, forget ENUM.
Just call sip:tony@aloha.net or whatever. No ITU involvement there (yet).
Yes, I know that doesn't work on normal phones, but neither will ENUM that
isn't tied to ITU etc. Personally, I think that's the future in 10
years time. Remembering one set of digits for one medium of communication,
and one set of alphanumerics for all others sounds like something in
need of simplification, and using numeric addresses only for email
died with compuserve.

(*) = I know there are other uses for ENUM like routing codes, in company
directories, etc.

Alex

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