ENUM and VoIP Technically Ready, Other Than ‘Fine Tuning’
Technical work on ENUM telephony domains is nearing completion, said developers from different countries last week at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Washington. “We are finished with major road work; now we are fine tuning,” said Jiri Kuthan, founder of Siptel, a major vendor of Sip Routers. Kuthan is chmn. of one of the IETF working groups doing the “fine tuning.”
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
With regard to ENUM domains, which target convergence between the public switched network and IP telephony by providing a number look-up service in the Domain Name System (DNS) Europe, many national numbering zones already are delegated and in trials or already headed for commercial service, officials said. “ENUM adds a few very interesting scenarios to VoIP telephony, especially because it ties Internet telephony to the legacy PSTN,” said Kuthan.
At the IETF meeting, representatives of the Swiss ccTLD and ENUM registry Switch and their colleagues from Austria proposed systems for the validation of phone numbers. The validation is required of ENUM providers by European regulatory bodies to prevent pirates from squatting on phone numbers. According to the Austrian model, a special record would be required carrying a transaction number, the ENUM number, the registrar in charge and the validation agency, their method of validation and a expiration date. The signed record handed over a chain of trust up to the central registry then could be automatically checked by the registry, said Michael Haberler of the Internet Foundation Austria.
Additional information about the validated number could be added according to data privacy rules of the respective country. Switch’s proposal is somewhat less burdensome in avoiding the demand for signatures between the different partners, officials said. Other additional standards for ENUM intend to avoid double checking of ENUM requests, and the adaption of the new Whois protocol “crisp” for ENUM.
Despite the rush of European developers to finish the various standards, the U.S. is still some way from an ENUM trial, said Karen Mulberry of Sprint, because of the coordination efforts necessary to set up one Registry for the N. American 001 numbering plan. Sprint is a member of the recently formed “Code 1 ENUM limited Liability Company” (CC1 ENUM LLC) that now plans to have ENUM 001 domains delegated by Jan. 2006. According to Mulberry, talks were under way to hand the ENUM tier one registry for 001 to the Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA.
For now, the political questions were far bigger than remaining technology questions, said Kuthan. Standards for emergency calls also are worked on in the IETF. In Europe, numbering regulation could get in the way of quick adoption. Haberler said European regulators should follow the U.S. not to allow VoIP regulation at the state level. “National regulation in Europa could lead to a patchwork,” warned Haberler.