[enum-wg] ENUM Adoption - Does a business case matter?

Rui Ribeiro wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I'm new to the list, so this will be my first post... I'm making a
> master thesis on ENUM and its adoption (or non adoption). My
> background is 100% technical, so I'm "a believer" that ENUM is like a
> swiss knife to handle all kind of addressing problems between E-164
> numbering and the new Internet URI based services. It can solve many
> other problems and can, even, be the base/enabler to new services.
> 
> But I wonder if this is the pragmatic view that we should have about
> new things.
> 
> What if ENUM is getting "hard" to deploy because it can't provide a
> business model to its "stake holders"?

This is indeed the problem.

I'm a techie myself, but I've learned the hard way that technological
superiority is pretty much useless by itself. Unless the business
incentives and the marketing align, you will not get your superior idea
adopted by the marketplace (or even standardized).

Actually, your subject should be "ENUM Adoption - Does anything except the
 business case matter at all?".

So, what chains shackled user-ENUM to its current subsistence?

Some comments:

* User ENUM is a technology for voice as a product, and not voice as
  a service.  See http://www.shirky.com/writings/zapmail.html

* See also the idea behind http://www.phonegnome.com/
  More below.

* SIP is a mess. Basic calling is bad enough, given the troubles
  with NATs, Firewalls and other middleboxes, but interoperability
  for more advanced phone features is terrible.

  If you link average PBXs, Asterisk installations, ... you will get
  spurious errors. Sudden one-way audio. Dropped calls on handovers, ...

* Price erosion. The current prices for regular telephony are so low
  that working around the telcos doesn't make as much sense as it used to.

* Call pricing these days is by far dominated by termination fees, not
  geography and distance.

  So: optimizing the route will give you minimal benefits compared to
  bypassing the toll-gate at the entrance of the terminating operator.

* There is NO incentive for a carrier to accept anonymous SIP calls from
  the Internet. Quite to the contrary. Termination fees are a significant
  part of their revenue (not in all countries!). Less hassle with DoS, Spit
  and legal issues.

  Opening up SIP ingress point robs carriers their "termination monopoly"
  with regards to their own customers. Bad idea for them.

* There is little incentive for a carrier to do ENUM resolution on outbound
  calls. Why? All the ENUM marketing says, "make free calls using ENUM",
  thus the customer won't accept fees on such calls.

  Bottom line for the carrier:
	* no enum: charge wholesale price + x %, no technical challenges
	* enum: charge nothing. Happy debugging SIP with whatever software
		the other side has mis-configured.

  All he gets from outbound ENUM is a marketing boost.

* What might actually work is when PBX vendors get together and add
  ENUM to their boxes and certify that the interconnection between these
  boxes actually _works_.

  That's a bit like the phonegnome mentioned above.

  This doesn't quite work with plain user ENUM though, as there is
  no mechanism there to signal that you only want to talk to certified
  ENUM-aware PBXs.

  I've written up some ideas on how you could enhance ENUM / SIP to do
  that, see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-lendl-speermint-federations-03
  (+referenced docs).

* There certainly will be uses for ENUM in the carrier space, though
  from what I see I doubt that they will manage to build the single
  I-ENUM tree necessary to drive the global, optimal, multi-hop
  VoIP routing we actually need.

  If you want to read up on what b0rkeness the IETF is currently
  hatching, have a look at http://tools.ietf.org/wg/drinks/

  (Lest that I'm accused of not offering alternative ideas, see
  http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-lendl-speermint-background-02 )

/ol
-- 
// Otmar Lendl <lendl at nic.at>, T: +43 1 5056416 - 33, F: - 933 //