VoIP and ENUM

Some things may take a while, some may take even longer. At March 22, 2006 (14 month ago) I posted: Irish-Austrian Consortium Provides ENUM Services in Ireland.

The Irish Commision for Communication Regulation (ComReg) announced today officially that an Irish-Austrian Consortium wins competition for the provision of ENUM services in Ireland.

December 19, 2006 I wondered what was going on and see, instantly they re-acted and immediately afterwards ENUM went into commercial service in Ireland:

IENUM, the Irish ENUM Registry opened service today. Some snippets from the news:

IENUM Limited, a 70% subsidiary of the IE Domain Registry (IEDR), today announced the availability of user ENUM (Electronic Numbering) services for telephone number holders in Ireland.

Ireland is now the seventh country to announce the availability of ENUM services. IENUM Limited was selected as the Tier 1 ENUM registry following the first international commercial tender process. The IEDR's partner in the IENUM consortium is Internet Privatstiftung Austria (IPA), the Austrian organisation which operates the .at domain name and provided the first commercial ENUM registry service in the world.

ENUM domains can now be registered at www.my-enum.ie for Geographic telephone numbers (eg 01 or 045 etc), Mobile phone numbers, '076' Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) numbers, and '0700' Personal Number Service numbers. The cost of an ENUM domain is 1 euro per month plus a validation fee, currently 25 euro payable on first registration, and 5 euro on revalidation.
.....

ComReg's Chairperson, Mike Byrne, said: ComReg is encouraged to see the emergence of ENUM as a full commercial service in Ireland today. ENUM has the potential to be a key enabler of advanced IP-based services. ComReg has been to the fore in encouraging the development of ENUM in Ireland and we are pleased to welcome the opening of IENUM's service which we see as an innovative and potentially valuable new communications facility for Irish consumers.

BTW, next week I will be chairing the ENUM and VoIP Peering Forum 2007 in Berlin, and Mike Byrne will speak about ENUM from a Regulators Perspective. The two day conference will feature also other very interesting speakers:

Carsten Schiefner (DT, RIPE and Denic), Andrzej Bartosiewicz (NASK), John Horrocks (ETSI), Kim Fullbrook (O2 UK, GSMA), Robert Schischka (enum.at), Thomas de Haan (Ministry of Economic Affairs, NL), Chan-Ki Park (NIDA, Korea), Rodrigue Ullens (Voxbone), Xavier Casajoana (VozTelecom), Wilhelm Wimmreuter, Pieter Nooren (TNO, NL), Tony Holmes (BT, ENUM UK, ETSI), Ondrej Filip (CZ.NIC) and last, but not least Richard Shockey (Neustar, IETF ENUM).

On Monday afternoon, Adrian Georgescu (AG Projects) will lead a half-day interactive workshop on sucessfull business model for ENUM.

My presentation can be retrieved from here.

Labels: Conference, ENUM, VoIP Peering

The last 5 weeks have been very busy.

It started with an ETSI TISPAN WG4 meeting in Darmstadt 27. February to 2. March. WG4 is dealing with Numbering/Naming and Address Resolution in NGN.

This was followed by the "IIR ENUM Conference in London, UK on 6.-7. March.

The speakers where the ususal suspects: Tony Holmes, Ronan Lupton, Kim Fullbrook, Penn Pfautz, Andy Reid, Richard Shockey, Paul Rosbotham, John Wilkinson, Robert Schischka, Karen Mulberry, Martin Hoffman, Gary Richenaker and myself.

The presentation from Paul Rosbotham (C&W) was very interesting, because he explained the future ideas in UK about Number Portability. Here it fits that Andy Reid (BT) said in his presentation one should look forwards and not backwards. I hope that this proposal on NP is not the last word. My presentation can be found here.

The next week I was in Budapest speaking at the VIB Conference Global VoIP Strategies, 13.-14 March. I was speaking about VoIP Interconnection and my presentation is here.

From 19.-23. March, I was in Prague at the IETF#68.

The ENUM WG is nearing its end and will be closing down soon. The Infrastructure ENUM drafts are ready and may be sent over to ITU-T with a liaison statement, so god and the IESG will. What is required still is a method to create Enumservices without WG involvement.

SPEERMINT is working on use-cases for VoIP and IM. Afterwards the WG will create requirements and then maybe an interconnect architecture.

From 26.-30. March I was again at ETSI TISPAN 13bis, this time in Sophia Antipolis. The meeting produced again over 500 temporary documents.

WG4 is slowly sorting out their documents, creating an umbrella document on Numbering/naming Address Resolution (NAR), pointing to the three main functions (each contained in a separate detailed document):

-processing of dialled digits to target names (major problem: handling of non-E.164 numbers)
-target name to address translation (e.g. ENUM, LoST, ..)
-route determination (finding a route from a SIP-URI)

TISPAN is slowly discovering that they need some kind of NNI and some means to interconnect.

Now I am finally enjoying my easter vacation ;-)

Labels: ENUM, Interconnect, VoIP Peering

Lennart Maris from the Eindhoven University of Technology published his master thesis on Infrastructure ENUM.

Congratulations, this is a nice piece of work.

In the first part, Lennart gives a very good overview on the status of User and Infrastructure ENUM and VoIP Peering.

He correctly identifies the two main application areas for Infrastructure ENUM:

1. facilitating VoIP interconnection and
2. facilitating number portability.

He then creates 4 implementation models:

1. The closed model,
2. Open Infrastructure ENUM: The email model,
3. The compromise model and
4. Next Generation COIN.

These so called implementation models comprise VoIP interconnection and number portability as the two application areas for Infrastructure ENUM. The main difference between the implementation models is the degree of openness. Roughly there are two approaches for the organizational structure of Infrastructure ENUM: an open and a closed approach. Model 1 & 4 represent the closed approach and model 2 & 3 represent the open approach.

He then made a questionaire of stakeholders in the Netherlands: regulators, operators, vendors and interest groups.

The results are very interesting:

• No seriously considered alternatives for Infrastructure ENUM technology exist.
• No overall consensus for a particular organizational structure exists.
• Facilitators, vendors and interest group clearly support the open models.
• DGET/OPTA have a neutral position with regard to Infrastructure ENUM and the other stakeholders confirm this position.
• Operators are seen by all stakeholders as initiators/locomotives of an Infrastructure ENUM initiative.
• It is most likely that in the short term the closed models will arise and in the long term these closed models will merge with other models.
• Introduction of Infrastructure ENUM does not require a change in business model except for the email model.

There is only one serious mistake in the thesis: Lennart is assuming that Infrastructure ENUM is only working for VoIP. This is not true. Infrastructure ENUM may also contain PSTN lines, ported and non-ported.

Another minor drawback is the limited reach (only Dutch respondents), but this is recognized in the thesis. It is also recognized that the knowledge of the issues around ENUM and VoIP peering are not the same with all respondents.

Labels: ENUM, VoIP Peering