Hi Carsten!
there is at least one crucial thing that might actually hinder a massive take-up in registration figures
There are at least two other ones: - Unless the Telco regulators in each country would enforce ENUM lookup *combined* with rules on pricing (one has to be careful to ask for both; see Austria for example) ENUM will not mean anything to anyone out there in the field. - As long as there is no QoS at all available to the average home or small / medium business user open VoIP is not going to happen, unfortunately. Again, this may be a regulatory issue. I am actually suprised to still see you guys working. I have been an ENUM enthusiast when it came up, but went away when it turned out it's just not going to happen. AFAIK, some delegations have already been passed back to the ITU just because those who had them found out they don't need / don't want them any more. Looking at https://confluence.terena.org/display/NRENum/NRENum.net+service : I guess nobody here cares for a list of ENUM trees for this, that and the other. Also when it says "It's not about free calls, it's about new services", could anyone come up with a real live example? I know two types of people: Skype users who for the sake of it being free accept it's unreliability and couldn't care less about it's non-openness and people who seldom make calls abroad and have a flatrate on their GSM handset. That's 98,5% of the telco voice market. I hate to say it but it's reality. Wasn't there also some system where one would dial 12345 * 67890 where 67890 would be treated like a domain and 12345 would be the "local part" of that phone number? Well, also phone numbers become less and less interesting as people dial contacts on their Smartphone which they sync from their contacts lists anywhere in the cloud. Why don't we just turn to H.323 and use IPv6 addresses as phone numbers if we think we want VoIP. My 2 cents. Sorry, but I am just trying to be realistic. Regards, Torsten -------- Original-Nachricht --------
Datum: Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:56:54 +0200 Von: Carsten Schiefner <enumvoipsip.cs@schiefner.de> An: bod@enumfederation.org, enum-wg@ripe.net, "Patrik Fältström" <paf@frobbit.se> Betreff: [enum-wg] The ENUM Federation: activities, website etc.
Distribution List:
+> bod@enumfederation.org +> ???, enum.at (Austria) +> Pavel Tuma, CZ.NIC (Czech Republic) +> Joerg Schweiger, DENIC (Germany) +> ???, SIDN (Netherlands) +> ???, nominet (United Kingdom)
+> enum-wg@ripe.net +> Niall O'Reilly, RIPE ENUM WG Co-Chair +> Carsten Schiefner, RIPE ENUM WG Co-Chair
+> Patrik Fältström, ENUM inventor
===
Dear all -
first of all, I do hope that you all have had some lovely holidays and could relax and recharge batteries!
As you may be aware, I have had some multilateral, but also bilateral talks with some of you wrt. the ENUM Federation and particularly its website at:
http://www.enumfederation.org/
As I got it, there have recently some ideas been floated around amongst the BoD members about a very last attempt to give the idea behind the Federation a push.
Reasons are, amongst others, that ENUM in the Carrier space gets more and more grip, but also in the public name space with the advent of the NRENUM activities.
But although the registration of a phone number as an ENUM domain bears quite some similarity with the usual registration of a domain under a TLD, there is at least one crucial thing that might actually hinder a massive take-up in registration figures, even if all other preconditions are fully in place: that is that the registrant would never fully "own" a number where the ENUM domain is derived from - contrary to a classic domain name. There is carrier and geopgraphic number portability in place, of course - however, if one cancels the PSTN service the number comes with the number goes away too.
So, the ENUM federation could also be a good place to initiate a discussion about a change in this regulation scheme, for example.
Anyhow: I'd see such (re)launch activities quite complementary to what is usually being discussed and done in the ENUM WG, as the focus of the Federaion is much more on the actual promotion of ENUM in a commercial sense, if I am correct.
I would be happy to take this up - and what I have heard from Niall sounds very similar. So please consider this email a kick-off to start some meaningful debate how it shoud be proceeded.
All the best,
Carsten