[governance] What Will Happen [@ NARALO/ALAC/CCNSO?]

[Karl Auerbach]

yehudakatz at mailinator.com wrote:
> Ok, I understood your point.
> 
>> One can not assign "a unique ENUM" any more than one can build a home
>> firewall/router and assign it unique IP address or build a mobile phone and
>> at the factory assign it a unique telephone number.
> 
> My view is that Manufactures will purchase “blocks of addresses” from Nuestar, 
> then as Deveices are produced, each one is assigned/registered an address. 

Again, that is not the way ENUM works.  (I heard a similar claim once in 
which it was said that one very large printer manufacturer was planning 
on building-in a unique IPv4 address for every printer it built.)

ENUM maps domain names to URI's.

Perhaps some companies and companies want to get into the business of 
providing such mappings.  But they certainly won't be selling "blocks" - 
they will, instead be selling the service of maintaining that mapping.

And perhaps some telco's will want to do VoIP to PSTN/Mobile mappings. 
But they have the resources to do it themselves and hardly need to 
purchase a block of anything from anybody to do so, nor even to use ENUM 
to do it.

Many, perhaps most VoIP providers today do connection to the PSTN 
without ENUM at all.  Instead they provide a SIP proxy to which the VoIP 
phone connects and then either do a local mapping of the target SIP URI 
into a PSTN number or they pick up the called digits from the 
SIP+RTP/RTCP signalling stream.  Then they feed that called PSTN number 
into their PSTN hookup and voila.

On inbound from the PSTN they usually do a 1:1 mapping of called number 
to SIP URI.

ENUM was an idea that was marginally interesting in 2001.  And it is 
still useful as a one tool in a toolkit of call routing and mapping 
mechanisms.

But the idea that there will be national ENUM hierarchies that form 
critical infrastructure cores is quite obsolete.

There is, I suspect, interest in national ENUM mechanisms from some of 
the agencies that, here in the US, we refer to as "spook agencies" - the 
folks who are fond of central points of traffic flow so that they can 
more easily intercept or monitor the calls.  ENUM makes a rather nice 
central place to know who is calling whom and, in addition, coerce calls 
to flow through recording machines.

The world is moving towards "phone names" rather than "phone numbers". 
VoIP phones natively reach one another using URI's (with embedded domain 
names) - VoIP phones don't need ENUM.

A while back I did a query of folks using Asterisk (a very popular open 
source phone exchange package) and I couldn't find more than a handful 
who had even bothered to activate the ENUM mechanisms much less use them 
on any sort of production basis.

Legacy POTS and most existing mobile phones don't know a URI from a 
chocolate cake.

As I mentioned before, there is going to be a great business in mapping 
between VoIP to POTs and mobile phones.  But as I mentioned, ENUM is but 
one trick in a large bag of tricks that can be used to do that mapping. 
  And it is a business that, like my analogy to motor parts for air 
cooled VW motors, is today large, but it will diminish with the passage 
of time.

The larger, and far more important issue here, is how do we make the 
internet as reliable for lifeline grade services as the PSTN?

Step #1, it would seem, would be to oversee that the root and TLD layer 
of DNS servers are operated to very high standards and that there are 
well conceived and well tested failure recovery plans and resources. 
Unfortunately that was a job that ICANN was supposed to do but that it 
has not - leaving the net vulnerable to the whims of those who operate 
root and TLD services.

		--karl--
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