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

Hi Otmar!

Thank you very much for your input and sorry for my late reply. I had to
take the time to properly read the material you provided.

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

This will provide some terminology. So "X as a product" means: Buy the
device and use it without any ongoing relevant charges.

> * SIP is a mess.

Many people think that. (Including me.) I wonder on what H.323 died,
though. IMO it has been around before and it's so straight-forward,
isn't it. I mean, it's entirely incompatible with NAT, but in an IPv6
world, maybe H.323 would be the answer.

> * 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.

Not as much but still some; especially in international contexts and
when it comes to GSM calls. Note that some countries virtually have no
fixed networks at all.

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

True. But at the same time, more and more customer terminals (I am
speaking of the fixed network again now) are IP anyway. The grassroots
way of dealing with this would possibly to teach people who they can
make their terminals reachable on the IP level, thus bypassing the
termination. In a lot of GSM networks, the termination prices are still
prohibitive.

> * There is little incentive for a carrier to do ENUM resolution on
> outbound calls. Why?

I think many customers would still accept to pay the price of an on-net
call to reach an ENUM target. Which would be fair, because the effort a
carrier has for delivering a call to an ENUM target is even less than an
on-net call.

Potential incentives include:

- Customer pressure
- Regulatory pressure

but I think this has been discussed enough. When it comes to the latter
one (regulation) at least in Germany we have a new political party which
has the potential to understand this subject and bring it up. Let's see
what happens there.

>   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).

Brilliant and to the point.

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

What can we do to put this ideas into practice? I would be willing to
help. Anyone else?

To get back to the technical level, I think there is a difference
between inbound and outbound calls.

Let's put a NAT and firewalls asides and assume a publicly routed IP
address would be the norm. Let's assume one would want to market a
"Voice as a product" gizmo. Its physical appearance might look like this:

http://www.snom.com/en/produkte/snom-m3-voip-phone/
or like this
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/phones/ps379/

It would possibly just have a different firmware image than those they
get shipped with today. (Ever tried to configure an SPA-921 for example???)

For such a device to be able to make an outbound call, there would be no
need to register anywhere. It could just query e164.arpa to find the
target, then init the call. Of course that would limit you to making IP
calls, but let's assume I would be willing to live with that.

The other way round, I would have to put up something into the ENUM tree
to make other users reach me on such a device. So why not
h323:mystaticipv6 address. Period.

That would make a perfect customer owned network. No frills. 1-step
configuration with 2-3 fields to fill in. No operator needed. No fees.
Just works.

Anyone interesting to help building this?

Regards,
Torsten



Otmar Lendl schrieb:
> 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