VoIP and ENUM

I participated yesterday in Frankfurt at the 5th ENUM-Day organized by denic.de, the German ccTLD and also responsible for the 9.4.e164.arpa ENUM Trial. The program can be found here.

It started with a surprise. Andeas Bäß (Boardmember DeNIC) declared the Trial to be finished and presented the results. He also declared that ENUM in Germany is now ready for commercial operation, to be started latest January 1th, 2006. After Sandra Stickelmann gave some details of the operational model and policy, Dr. Mirko Paschke from the Bundesnetzagentur (former RegTP) gave his view on this.

The big surprise here was that the regulator was also taken by surprise about the end of the trial (he has not seen the document yet), and he was also VERY surprised about the statement of Andreas Bäß that operation will commence end of this year.

Although he appreciated that the trial has ended and commercial operation may start soon in principle, he pointed to the fact that first the ministry of trade (BMWA) has to agree. In addition a call for bids and a contract between the BMWA or the Bundesnetzagentur may be required. (See also Monika Ermert - Heise.de (German).

In the discussion Andreas Bäß stated that ENUM is dealing with domain names and therefore the Bundesnetzagentur has no say. This was definitely - to formulate it correctly - not a very wise statement. Maybe he should go back and (re-)read the "Interim Procedures for geographic country codes", especially section:

3.4 Change in National Position

If a Member State notifies the TSB of a change in its position, the TSB will communicate that change to RIPE NCC, who will implement the change. The changes can be:

1. A previously granted approval becomes an objection. In this case, the delegation will be removed and ENUM will no longer be available for the concerned CC.


2. A previously stated opposition, or lack of approval, becomes an approval. In this case, the delegation will be granted and ENUM will be available for the concerned CC.


3. There is a change in the party to which the CC is delegated, that is, a change in the ENUM Tier 1 Registry. In this case, the TSB will notify RIPE NCC of that change and the change will be implemented.

That is, a Member State may at any time stop, enable, or change ENUM delegations.

So tomorrow the BWMA may get funny and tell the ITU-TSB and RIPE to change the delegation of 9.4.e164.arpa to say nic.at or switch.ch (because they have more experience and are running the more advanced registry system) - and DeNIC is done.

One last remark to this issue: Thou shalt not take your regulator by surprise.

In the afternoon Rich Shockey and I gave presentations on the current developments in IETF and other standard bodies and also about the status of discussions on Carrier ENUM. Adrian Georgescu followed with a excellent presentation on Number Portability using SIP and ENUM.

Tim Denton (who to my surprise also showed up in Frankfurt) and I liked most was Adrians advice what regulators should really do:

• Explain what ENUM is because nobody knows (my say ;-)
• Require VoIP Operators to provide SIP URIs
• Require national domain registry to support ENUM
• Require telcos to have ENUM enabled gateways

Also Henry Sinnreich will like this ;-)

Adrian presented the netheads view of NP, SIP and ENUM.

The next presentation was from Martin Fröhlich (Telefonica). He presented the bellheads view. My take from this presentation was that one of us two has a serious problem in understanding IP, SIP and ENUM.

All presentations can be downloaded from here.