VoIP and ENUM

Today the real work started with the inconvenience that most of the participants are in the wrong place and had to take the shuttle bus from the Haynes to the new BCEC. The reason is the big success of the VON. Jeff told us already yesterday that there are about 7000 participants and especially the exhibition floor required exceeded the capacity of the Haynes.

We arrived quite early at the BCEC, so there was enough time to meet friends and have some chats over breakfast.

I visited of course the Communications Policy Summit. The first session was also the most important for me, because of the issue and also because of the panelists: Marilyn Cade as moderator and Todd Daubert, Karen Mulberry, Penn Pfautz, Richard Shockey and last but not least as surprise: John Klensin.

The basic topic was the future of numbering in the context of IP, the move from the local context to personal numbers, number portability on IP is basically a no-brainer and to separate the regulatory consequences from numbering. One issue was also the proposal to have a special number range for VoIP also in the NANP. The problem of gettoization of VoIP was raised here and I pointed to the problem we have in Austria with such numbers to get first all natuonal providers to route to these number ranges and after this by the international providers. The tariffing of such numbers is also a problem. Jonathan Askin confirmed this problem with the 500 number range they have for personal numbers in the NANP. These numbers are routed currently only by MCI. This is one of the main reasons why VoIP providers insist on geographic numbers, even if personal number ranges would be better suited.

The highlight of the session was of course the statement from John Klensin: "ENUM is dead, the window is closed". The most interesting with this statement was to watch Richard Shockey's face sitting to the right side of John ;-)

I personally do not think that the window is closed, considering the recent developments regarding Carrier ENUM John may not be aware of, and the urgent need of the carriers to implement IP Interconnect (VoIP peering), but if we are not careful and the US is not changing pace and keeps playing around, the window will start closing soon.

The next session was on lawful intercept. Since I was only partially present, I would like to point here to James Seng, who has quite an extensive report on this session (and also on the session in the afternoon on Communications Act Re-Write).

This session was followed by emergency response. Since I will report on Emergency services in a separate entry after the Panel: Emergency Services for Internet Communications, Wednesday, September 21, 10:30pm in Room 205C, where I also have the honor to participate beside some real experts such as Brian Rosen, Henning Schulzrinne, Henry Sinnreich, Marc Linsner, Hannes Tschofenig, et. al., I will skip this for now.

During Lunch Senator John Sununu talked about the future legislation on IP Communicatuons from his perspective. A summary of his speech is available at the VoIP Magazine from Tim Shelton.

I joined the sessions again with the excellent Industry Perspectives:

The highlight was of course by Jon "maddog" Hall, President, Linux International, who gave an excellent rationale why to use open source SW. A somewhat critical report can be found on Alec Saunders blog.

Alec reports also about the presentions by Tom Evslin and Jeffrey Citron.

One should think that this is enough for one day, but it continued immediatly with the opening of the Exhibit Hall and the Welcome Reception.

I will post this in a separate entry.