VoIP and ENUM

As I also mentioned my short introduction moderating the "ENUM Now" panel most activities regarding ENUM is taking place currently in Private ENUM space. Private ENUM is defined currently as everything not in e164.arpa (User ENUM) and also not in the envisaged Infrastructure ENUM in ie164.arpa.

So basically the US Provider ENUM mentioned in my previous blog entry is also a Private ENUM.

Nearly every week some new developments happen here - a short summary.

XConnect to Acquire e164.info

XConnect, the world’s largest provider of “Plug and Peer” Voice over IP (VoIP) peering services announced that they will be acquring e164.info, the operator of the largest international private ENUM registry. The combined company creates the world's largest VoIP peering community worldwide, serving more than 150 VoIP operators.

So XConnect is now the largest ;-)

SPIDER

On Tuesday at the Spring VON Europe Arbinet and Netnumber jointly announced SPIDER, the Registry of Registries.

The Service Provider ID E.164 Record (SPIDER) registry is a set of low-cost, lightweight shared database tools that enables the efficient exchange of interconnect address information between trusted communications service providers and VoIP communities. The SPIDER registry is managed by SPIDER Registry, Inc., a non-stock, not-for-profit industry group administered by a Board of Directors comprised of IP-communications industry representatives from around the world. The SPIDER registry database infrastructure was created to address a well-defined industry problem relating to the interconnection of VoIP services between the large number of VoIP “islands” or communities emerging around the world.

SPIDER is not ENUM, it is a registry which may push the data in your private ENUM database. In principle the model is workable, here I trust Netnumber and Doug Ranalli. But they claim to be a global registry, so I wonder how this scales if all 4.000.000.000 phone numbers of the world are pushed down to your DNS or SIP Redirect server - good luck.

The charging system is also a bit weird from an European perspective, it is created after the US model in SS7, where you pay per dip, in the SPIDER case for a sucessful dip. Together with the push model this requires that you have your fingers in the customers SW and set up a complicated charging transfer system. To me it seems more feasible to charge per transaction in the database.

USER and/or Infrastructure ENUM in Romania by AG-Projects

ANISP, the Romanian Internet Service Provider Association http://www.anisp.ro representing more than 40 service providers (http://www.anisp.ro/?c=membri) has awarded AG Projects to build the ENUM platform for provisioning of the ENUM tree 0.4.e164.arpa. The Romanian ENUM exchange will be hosted in two RoNIX locations (Romanian Network for Internet eXchange) and will be backed up by an infrastructure hosted within the European backbone. The 0.4.e164.arpa is under the authority of the Romanian regulatory body ANRC, which by end of this year planned to define the final procedures of delegation and administration of the public ENUM tree 0.4.e164.arpa.

“We selected AG Projects to provide infrastructure ENUM and SIP peering services to facilitate on-net multimedia sessions between Romanian VoIP operators. We believe that Internet standards combined with the use of global identities like E.164 numbers in the official 0.4.e164.arpa tree are the key to enable transition from the classic PSTN to rich-media IP services like voice and video over IP” says Mihai Batraneanu, President of ANISP.

So I am a bit confused now: Is it User ENUM or Infrastructure ENUM?

This also clearly shows that two separate trees for User and Infrastructure ENUM is required, before this confusion in increasing.

ENUM starts in Bulgaria

Just over two months after the U.S. (+1) Enum delegation, the country code +359 has been assigned to the Bulgarian Internet Society (ISOC-Bulgaria), adding Bulgaria to the club of ENUM enabled countries. The codes are governed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in co-operation with national governments.

The Aim for ISOC-Bulgaria is to foster the implementation of ENUM public and infrastructure services, delivering local & global number portability based on the best practices from other ENUM deployments around the world, said Veni Markovski, President and Chairman of the Board of ISOC-Bulgaria.

“This development will bring new possibilities for additional services and deliver robust, flexible and cost effective Local number portability solutions, offering new services to the end user and additional revenues for the services providers”, said Alex Nikolov CTO of Enum2Go Ltd who were responsible for the first commercial deployment of Enum services based on the +87810 country code.

Over recent months several more countries have announced major developments in this field; The Republic of Ireland have launched a commercial service, Austria have commenced their Infrastructure Enum trial, and the United Kingdom is aiming to have a commercial service in readiness for November 2006. These major developments, are creating a growing interest from service providers and opening new possibilities for global investors as new service offerings are emerging.

In the week of the announcement of the progress made by Bulgaria towards accession to European Union, this news is yet another reassuring step for the IT sector and the society.

Amen