[enum-wg] repost: Proposal for non-geographic ENUM E.164 UPTS for the general public

Hi Chris,

Chris Heinze wrote:
> that's germany. +49 numbers are in their regions fully portable between 
> pstn providers. currently large regional blocks are reallocated by voip 
> gateway providers to voip-users. so a voip-user from e.g. dresden can 
> have a number from e.g. duesseldorf, hamburg, berlin, munich - or all of 
> them.

... and which AFAIK is of some major concern to the regulator. Apart 
from the fact that they don't have any real means at hand right now, 
they do not get tired of repeating their unhappiness.

> that's really ugly but voip providers actually have no big choice. 
> there is a 'region' reserved for non-regional (in the end of course 
> still national) numbers (+4932), but this is currently discussed and 
> it's unlikely that this prefix will be useably anytime soon. also, there 
> are strong doubts that this prefix will be freely available to 
> voip-providers, the current discussion shows that there will probably be 
> dependencies and drawbacks especially for voip.

That is one of my concerns - that according to the current draft only 
"real" telcos can get numbers or blocks out of that range. So any VoIP 
only provider just has to rely on others instead of being able to deal 
with the regulator directly.

Another one is (and I find that in your proposal, too) the idea of 
allocating/assigning blocks: at the end of the day we are also talking 
domains here. In the domain world such a concept is totally unknown (for 
good reasons!) and would not really be feaseble: get domain names 
starting with a to k from registrar A and from l to z from registrar B...?!

As you have to ensure portability in the long run anyways: why not 
assigning a number out of such blocks (whether it's +878xx, +4932 or 
something else) directly to the user? S/he can port the number to a 
provider of an own choice without creating "holes" in blocks allocated 
or assigned to providers/LIRs/...

IMHO the difference really is that people (apart from very few ;-) do 
not really care about the IP addresses they get because you hardly 
announce them to third parties as points of contact anyways. But you 
certainly do with your UPT/... numbers.

That, of course, would be a different registry type - more a domain 
registry that an RIR. But I am certainly not saying that an RIR cannot 
or even must not take up that business, too - given that all parties 
involved agree to it.

Cheers,

	-C.