hi!
I think Chris's idea is good in principle, though I'm not sure about its practicality. As Patrik says, use of non-geographic E.164 numbers touches on awkward corners of national telephony regulations. I think the ITU would take a dim view of this too. And that's aside from them being uneasy (unable?) about issuing a chunk of E.164 number space to an organisation that isn't an ITU member. IIUC ITU directly controls E.164 numbers used for Universal Personal Telephony, so they could well be touchy about another entrant into that space.
ah, thanks for this kind of input, for me personally that's most interesting, because it's sometimes really hard to get a good view on ITU procedures. can you think of a practical solution to satisfy the ITU's needs? maybe richard stasny can tell us more, the status of visionng is a private organisation afaik, so delegation of space under +878 is obviously not impossible, i even guess chances are that ITU might prefer RIRs as the organizations who proved that they are capable of doing a very good job on coordinating number resources and making them available to the general public in a free and nondiscriminating manner. also, i guess the needs of voip users would be served if the RIRs/NRO operate the delegation process using polices from the ITU, the idea was not to take away control from somebody. actually, if the ITU provides for a similar solution, i know of a large community that would be more than happy, no matter whether RIRs or the ITU were in charge - but i also think it wasn't a bad choice for ITU to delegate tier 0 operation to RIPE.
There would also be a conflict of interest given that RIPE NCC is already operating the registry for e164.arpa. So if the NCC was to apply for a non-geographic E.164 code and get it, this would probably need to be administered by a separate organisation from that running the e164.arpa registry.
i guess it's a sub-optimal idea to allocate the block to RIPE and RIPE only, the community of RIRs probably in the form of the NRO would be a better idea, as the space is meant to be used globally. actually the work RIPE did up to now as tier 0 operator demonstrates the high qualifications of RIPE as an enum-operator at the tier 0 and tier 1 levels quite convincingly. kind regards, Chris Heinze