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

Hi all,

> * Benefit and effort are on two different ends. If *I* maintain an ENUM
> entry for my phone number which points so a SIP address, *you* can possibly
> call me cheaper. So I need to maintain my entry, you have the benefit. Only
> the small number of situations where I as the called party care about what
> the calling party has to pay for the call will just not make the case;

In economy this is identified as an "externality". Often the solution
to this kind of problem is the investement of the state in order to
create a "critical mass" for it to grow it self. It was the way the
road, highways, railroad and telco started... Here I have to refeer to
the "Metcalfe's law" where: "the value of a telecommunications network
is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the
system".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law


> * It is hard for the calling party to make an ENUM call.

I agree... that's why I agree with your last sentence: "Put up a
regulation which makes an ENUM lookup on an outbound call mandatory
for operators; both fixed line as well as mobile."

The problem here is... isn't this too much? Why should the state force
this kind of "tecnological shift"? A few years ago I've been
architecting a nation wide voip network. One thing that came very
evident is that there would not be the need to create VoIP gateways to
users/companies if the operators would place and receive calls from
the VoIP world. Imagine... a farm of gateways in each operator, and
that's it! no one had to "mess up" with iPBX with T1/E1 connected to
it, no ISDN, no PSTN. Just clean VoIP (outside the operators).

> 1. Because the providers who give customers the devices are not interested
> in their customers reaching IP targets free of charge; they will rather want
> to charge for the call. So they might execute some influence on the makers
> of those boxes not to put a simple checkmark "Do ENUM lookup on outbound
> calls" in there.

And that isn't only on the user end equipments. There is a known
feature (ENUM support), that isn't documented, on the software of the
leading router company. It is available if you are willing to "dig
trough" the CLI.

But this is de "conspiracy" theory. I would like to avoid this line of
thought. The "economic" view is... if there isn't value in the market,
then there is no feature, because, if it were, the market would
provide the feature. I believe that this is a feature that not many
are willing to pay for...

> 2. There is little pressure from consumers as ENUM is an entirely unknown
> concept outside VoIP wizards. Even lots of people who do know what VoIP is
> don't know or don't care about ENUM.

That's true. That is why I wonder if ENUM is something that can be
marketable. What features could you associate with it in order to the
user come to the operator and say: "I need ENUM"!

Is VoIP still the only application for ENUM? Does ENUM is still on
time with the new telco paradigm (PSTN vs. IMS)? Was it overrun by
events? Does it still make sense? For how long? Is there any study
that demonstrate that users prefer (or not) numbers over URI's?


Thank you all,

Rui Ribeiro
racribeiro at gmail.com