VoIP and ENUM

ETSI TISPAN WG4 finished 2 drafts on User ENUM and on Infrastructure ENUM (Carrier ENUM) this week and got workgroup and TISPAN plenary approval today.

ETSI DTS 102 172 V2 "Minimum requirements for interoperability of ENUM implementations"

contains general guidance on (User) ENUM implementations as defined in RFC3761 and in ETSI TS 102 051 “ENUM Administration in Europe” and the specification for:

• The format, contents and meaning of the information in the NAPTR records that are held by the ENUM Tier 2 Nameserver providers and accessible by DNS.
• The ways in which ENUM client software should interpret and act upon information obtained from NAPTR records.

The document is intended to enable interoperability between ENUM implementations that are organized in different countries. This interoperability enables:

• The same ENUM client software to work with NAPTR records generated by different national implementations and this in turn will enable applications that use ENUM to access details of ENUM subscribers in more than one country without additional modifications.
• Organizations to function as ENUM Registrars and ENUM Tier 2 Nameserver Provider in more than one national implementation.

The document will therefore add economies of scope to the ENUM implementations that will benefit ENUM subscribers, providers, application service providers and ENUM users.

The present document is Version 2 of the Technical Specification (TS) and incorporates already some results obtained from trials performed in some countries. It may serve therefore also as a basis for first commercial deployments, keeping in mind that still not all enumservices are available as IETF RFCs and registered with IANA.

The intention is to review this document based on the experience gained from future implementations and if necessary.

ETSI DTR 102 055 "Infrastructure ENUM"

This document identifies a range of issues which occur if providers of communication services and networks (called Communication Service Providers (CSP) within this document) consider using the concepts developed in RFC 3761 (ENUM) for infrastructure purposes. Such an approach would result in the application of the ENUM concept to the provision of information for routeing (both internally and for the interconnection of networks – also called peering), including information for number portability, freephone and other number or address translation capabilities, SMS and MMS, etc.

It considers the likely steps along the way and where possible, identifies alternative options and approaches. It will specifically identify:

• issues which occur if providers of IMS-based NGNs consider peering traffic with each other via Points-of-Interconnect based on IP technology, by using E.164 numbers to address end-points they are hosting for their subscribers,
• issues which occur if providers of IMS-based NGNs consider peering traffic with other providers e.g. IMS-based PLMNs and also with providers on the Internet.

Out-of-scope are requirements for using Infrastructure ENUM for peering of transit traffic not targeted for end-points within the providers control.