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

>  There are some ENUM gateways in Germany. You can dial a landline phone
>  number and you will get a new ENUM dial tone. Many people have plans
>  which give them unlimited or very cheap calls from their mobile to
>  landlines, so you can call call from your handset in Germany to a SIP
>  address in China virtually free.
>  
>  Guess what ... Some network operators recently started to simply block
>  those access numbers. To make it a bit more complete, they also
>  blocked some other services such as calling card access numbers, phone
>  conferencing services and Podcast to Phone services.
>  
>  User's of those kind of services have complained to the regulator, who
>  didn't feel like saying anything about this. And given my
>  understanding EU telco regulation (I can't speak for other parts of the
world here)
>  I wonder if the use of a regular geographic landline number to provide a
>  gateway to VoIP targets would at all be in line with telecommunication
>  laws of if this has just been tolerated in the past, as many things
>  had been tolerated and are strictly enforced now.


If it were the US or Canada the regulators would not care as user controlled
end to end VoIP is specifically considered an Information service and
unregulated. The use of the NANP phone number is irrelevant. 

Remember there are two form of ENUM .. the 'classic ENUM" of RFC 3761 and
e164.arpa and the carrier ENUM which are private instantiations of enum
trees using the technology of 3761. Carrier ENUM which is essentially a
replacement for SS7 and Global Title Translation is doing just fine and
deploying rapidly for applications like MMS/SMS routing etc in carrier
networks.


>  
>  If you want ENUM acceptance, bring the subject up with the EU. They
>  gave the GSM operators trouble re their roaming charged; they may also do
>  something about ENUM.

Well since the GSM-A is organizing a private ENUM service for its operators
the Commission may well have something to say about that.

 BTW any speculation on whether Vivian Reading is to be renominated as the
EU telecom's regulator? 


>  
>  Regards,
>  Torsten
>  
>