VoIP and ENUM

Government wiretap plans may chill innovation
CNN.com - Government wiretap plans may chill innovation - Mar 22, 2004:

see also CALEA Joint Petition for Expedited Rulemaking

http://www.askcalea.com/jper.html

And here is Jeffs statement:

The Jeff Pulver Blog: The Value of Multiple ENUM Implementations

ICANN - New Sponsored Top-Level Domains

ICANN announced it has received 10 applications for new STLD's

ICANN | Announcement | Ten New Sponsored TLD Applications Received

For VoIP and ENUM the applications for .mobi and especially the two applications for .tel are of interest.

The application from Telname seems to be orthogonal and compatible to ENUM, the application from pulver.com is very similar to ENUM in e164.arpa. The question will be how similar.

For Carl Fords view on this see http://carlscorner.pulver.com/ March 23rd, 2004

So it is a competition.

BT spreads VoIP love across Europe

The Register - BT spreads VoIP love across Europe:
By Lucy Sherriff
Posted: 19/03/2004 at 15:02 GMT

CeBIT BT is rolling out managed VoIP services to businesses across Europe: Spain and Ireland first, later in Germany and the Netherlands.

The company is kicking off with two offerings: the top-of-the-range multimedia MM VoIP, aimed squarely at the more technophiliac CIOs; and the slightly less intimidating VoIP Port. The latter lets companies keep their old PBX systems a little bit longer, but companies should be under no illusions about the life of their infrastructure, John Blake, BT's head of IP at Global Services, says.

"Companies really extended the life of their PBXs when they upgraded everything getting ready for the millennium date change. Now many of them are 10 or 12 yeas old, and the maintenance costs are going up."

He argues that the switch to VoIP is inevitable: "Once companies realise they need to upgrade their telephony system, the value proposition of VoIP is too good to ignore. Past a certain threshold of adoption, it will no longer be cost effective to support PBX technology."

VoIP is a big theme at CeBIT this year, with plenty of deployments and availability of technology or of supporting peripherals. BT's announcement is slightly different in that it actually has a customer using the technology in the UK.

Abbey, the retail bank, outsourced the whole telecoms thing to BT last year in a deal worth 125m pound over five years. Now the company routes 80,000 calls a day over IP infrastructure.

BT is rubbing its hands with glee at the prospects of VoIP for business. According to Blake, the convergence between voice and data networks gives BT a great opportunity to consolidate its position as a services provider, as well as paving the way for upgrades. And if he can persuade even half of his sales leads to go from a 25kbit voice call to a full multimedia package with video streaming at 384kbit/s, he will be a happy man.

European Commission - Open Workshop on IP voice and associated convergent services

European Commission - Information Society - Telecommunications, Communications and Services:

On 15.03 the European Commission held a workshop in Brussels on an independent study carried out for the Commission by Analysys.

Analysys presented the findings of their study on Internet protocol (IP) voice and associated convergent services.

The study carried out by Analysys can be found here
The presentation, given by Analysys during the workshop can be downloaded by clicking .here.
We welcome written comments related to the Analysys paper and on VoIP in general.
Written contributions can be sent to infso-b1@cec.eu.int till the end of April

Comments to this report by OeFEG can be found here

OFCOM Voice over Broadband dicission group meeting

On 25 February 2004, a Voice over Broadband discussion group meeting was held by OFCOM. The presentations made at this are available at the link below. A list of attendees and notes of the breakout discussions and Q&A sessions that took place are now also available.

Ofcom Website | Voice over Broadband

Justice, FBI Seek Rules for Internet Taps
Sat Mar 13, 8:09 PM ET Add White House - AP Cabinet & State to My Yahoo!

By TED BRIDIS, AP Technology Writer

WASHINGTON - Technology companies should be required to ensure that law enforcement agencies can install wiretaps on Internet traffic and new generations of digital communications, the Justice Department (news - web sites) says.

The push would effectively expand the scope of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 law that requires the telecommunications industry to build into its products tools that U.S. investigators can use to eavesdrop on conversations with a court order. ....

Justice, FBI Seek Rules for Internet Taps

CSCN ENUM committee meeting
Ottawa, March 11, 2004

Agenda, participants and presentations given by Karen Mulberry, Richard Shockey, Bernhard Turcotte and Gary Richenaker available at:
Welcome to enumorg.ca

CIRA.ca has offered to host the NANP NPA codes on a temporary basis, under the direction of a competent authority, in order that delegation might be achieved from RIPE-NCC and the ITU-T for the whole of the North American Numbering Plan.

Internet NDC in Germany

RegTP bereitet Feld fuer Internet-Telefonie - 032 wird "Internetvorwahl":

"RegTP bereitet Feld fuer Internet-Telefonie - 032 wird 'Internetvorwahl'

Nach einem Entwurf derRegulierungsbehoerde fuer Telekommunikation und Post (RegTP), sollen Internet-Telefonnummern mit der neuen Vorwahl 032 beginnen, gefolgt von neun weiteren Ziffern, schreibt das Technologiemagazin Technology Review in seiner aktuellen Ausgabe 02/04. ...."

Der zitierte Artikel:

Technology Review | AKTUELL | Regulierer bereitet das Feld fuer Internet-Telefonie: "Regulierer bereitet das Feld fuer Internet-Telefonie

Vielversprechende Aussichten fuer Voice-over-IP-Angebote: Die Regulierungsbehoerde fuer Telekommunikation und Post (RegTP) hat eine Anhoerung gestartet mit dem Ziel, Regeln fuer die Vergabe von Festnetz-Telefonnummern an Internet-Diensteanbieter festzulegen; diese koennten die Nummern an Endkunden fuer Telefongespraeche mit Teilnehmern an konventionellen Anschluessen weitergeben. Zugleich waeren die Internet-Telefonierer ueber solche Nummern von jedem Fernsprechapparat weltweit erreichbar. Nach dem Entwurf, der Technology Review vorliegt, sollen die Internet-Telefonnummern mit der neuen Vorwahl 032 beginnen, auf die neun weitere Ziffern folgen. ...."

Sipgate.de is already using normal geographic numbers:

RP Online - Nachrichten - Ohne PC: Billig telefonieren per Internet

Zap-phone
Just another indication that VoIP is going to be a product and not a service.
- Richard

Vonage goes to the mall
Daiwa EuroTelcoblog No. 27, Friday 5th March, 2004

Vonage has today formally announced the conclusion of a marketing deal with US electronics retailing giant Circuit City, which will carry Vonage products in all 600 of its superstore locations, as well as online via www.circuitcity.com. This is a significantly larger deal than either of Vonage's previous arrangements with Radio Shack and Best Buy, and we think it really takes Vonage into the mainstream of American retailing. We have previously maintained that landing US deals of significant size, such as this one, would probably serve the company well as it prepares for an imminent European launch. We can only speculate as to what sort of retail partnerships might be in the pipeline related to the UK launch, but given that BT's own "Broadband Voice" product is available only online, we think a high-street presence would be a significant competitive advantage.

Clay Shirky: VoIP - Plan A vs Plan B
Shirky: VoIP - Plan A vs Plan B:

First published February 26, 2004 on the 'Networks, Economics, and Culture' mailing list.

2003 was a remarkable year in the US for voice over the internet (VoIP). If you needed a label for the events of the year, 'Collapse of Denial' would be a good one -- after a long period of relative inaction, the FCC and the state regulators are suddenly pushing hard for a regulatory framework. The question is no longer whether voice is going to become an internet application, but when.

'When' could still be a very long time, however. The incumbent local phone companies -- Verizon, SBC, BellSouth and Qwest -- have various degrees of interest in VoIP, but are loathe to embrace it quickly or completely, because doing so means admitting to everyone -- shareholders, regulators, customers -- that both monopoly control and artificially high voice revenues are going away. (The fact that this is true does not much lessen the pain of saying so.) As a result, they will likely try to convince regulatory agencies, both the FCC and the states', to burden competitive VoIP firms like Vonage with additional costs and rules, while delaying their own offerings.

Complicating this de facto Plan A, however, is the fact that VoIP isn't a service, it's just a set of protocols, meaning that competitors don't have to set themselves up as upstart phone companies to deploy VoIP. If Plan A is 'Replace the phone system slowly and from within,' Plan B is far more radical:

'Replace the phone system. Period.'

.....

Microsoft: Your Next Phone Company? -- I say NO

It's keeping mum, but the giant has already introduced software that could turn into the killer phone application
BW Online | March 2, 2004 | Microsoft: Your Next Phone Company?:

.....

EARLY WARNING? "The Pulver petition becomes important for the market when Microsoft pushes a voice product," say Blair Levin, an analyst with Legg Mason and former chief of staff at the FCC under William Kennard during the Clinton Presidency. "If you can turn each Windows PC into a voice device, you suddenly have a whole new phone network that never touches the public switched telephone."

.....

IF you can? -- You can already, it is there.

If you want to be called, just go to fwd.pulver.com, www.iptel.org or www.sipphone.com,
subscribe, download one of the free phone clients and you are set.

If you want to call some of these guys, just get their numbers, go to
www.myphonebooth.com
and call them from your browser (click-do-dial)
Or call any 1-800 freephone number.

If Myphonebooth is now in addition ENUM-enabled, which would just require you to enter a number in the international format +xxxxxxx, you could reach anybody which has his phone number in ENUM.

So the point is not

that Microsoft is the phone company

the point is

that the Internet is your phone network and if you are connected via broadband and have any device to attach, you are your own phone company. You may use Windows, a MAC, a LINUX device or even a WiFi-enabled mobile phone.

Period