Carsten wrote:

However, as I have learned in the meantime, Deutsche Telekom is offering a PSTN product called "T-Net vor Ort" (roughly: T-Net on-site) where a customer located in area A can get an area B number rerouted to his area A number - which appears to be pretty much what sipgate et al. are doing.

In Austria we have have this feature (although not very well known to to customers - like many ISDN features) since more then 20 years. It is simple: you get a number in an office without an attached physical line and simply put a Call Forwarding Unconditional (CFU) on it. Companies used this for routing local calls to their call centers located somewhere else before 0800 was introduced, so you see how old this feature is. Note however: you CANNOT originate calls using this number This will be important! Nobody had any problem with this, but again: "Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi" Back to the original dicussion: What are the problems with geographic numbers for VoIP? Since we have the same dicussion here in Austria too, some of the arguments: pro and contra But first some philosphical ideas about E.164 numbers: - an E.164 number is primarily an address(name) for a destination (end-point), in principle you do not need an E.164 number to originate a call (but see below), in the same way you do not need an address to post a letter. - you need an address for posting a letter only to identify youself and to provide a return address, same is valid for phone calls. -with originating phone calls you need an E.164 number only to provide call back CLI, identification (MCI) and geographic address for emergency calls (we will see later that this is an important argument) 1) A geographic number is giving you the approx location of the recipient This may be interesting for calling Pizza services, but with call forwardings and mobile phones this arguement does not hold. Note: there is of course a difference between NA an EU. In Europe most mobile numbers are different to geographic numbers, in NA all mobile numbers are also geogrphic. 2) a geographic number gives others the possibility to call you with local rates. This is BTW the major reason why geographic numbers are popular for VoIP. On the other hand, this reason will go away soon. 3) Popular cities may run out of numbers, requiring numbering changes. Ok, this may be true in the NANP, (but they seem to have no real problems there, not even in Washington ;-) but definitely not in the short term in Germany and Austria with variable lenght numbering plans and a clever assignment procedure and routing procedure (e.g. not giving away full numbering blocks to VoIP providers, but single numbers). Also one may assume that fixed PSTN numbers are given up for mobile numbers, so they may be ported to VoIP 4) Emergency services will get problems if called by these numbers. This IMHO the real problem, but it needs to be solved in a differnt way: providing location information for VoIP calls in general. The simplest approach is to use the same mechanism (partially implemented already, partially planned) for mobile calls by providing actual location information during the emergency call. The proposed solution is as follows: As long as emergency services have no access to actual location databases and rely on static information for geographic numbers, calls originating with geographic numbers to emergency services SHALL do this ONLY from the location provided to the location database (e.g. phone book). If a call is originated from a VoIP phone, this implies the call is either originated from the given location (in which case the geographic number may be used) or if from somewhere else, a non-geographic number must be used to indicate to the emergency service that the address provided in the location database may be incorrect and the real location need to be found out if necessary. This implies that a non-geographic number range is readily available for this use. It is also advisable that calling this non-geographic number range from within a country should be comparable with local call rates, so the tariffing argument is not valid (this is also feasible from a PSTN point of view, assuming that calls to this number range is routed to local gateways anyway) Now this leaves three options for geographic numbers. A) Strict: you need a fixed access in the geographic area (e.g. a DSL or cable) to get a geographic number and you may receive and originate calls only from this location. B) Less strict: You need a fixed location in the geographic area to get a geographic number, but you may receive calls anywhere. You may originate calls using the geographic number only from this location, if you are not at this location, you may either not originate calls or use a different non-geographic number Note: Since A can be converted with simple Call Forwarding immediately to B, A is useless. C) Liberal: You may get a geographic number anywhere without a having an access there to receive calls, but you are not allowed to originate calls using this number. For originations you must use a non-geographic number. This seems to be what the consumer want. Additional notes to consider: The whole situation is completely out of control anyway and any regulation on this issue will only hinder companies (especially national ones) to pursue their business: What is in principle the difference to the above cases on VoIP if a have a PSTN line with a geographic number connected to a SPA-3000 with an FXO port an now I make a call out the PSTN in Vienna (especially to an emergency service) via t he Internet (e.g. from Boston). No regulator can prevent this an it has the same effect as above. So the only argument that remains is number exhaust and this argument is currently not existing. Just wait and see. regards Richard