[enum-wg] market potential/future for public ENUM

Well as your former ENUM WG chair (yea!! NO BLUE DOT!!!) .. Yes public ENUM
is essentially dead.

ENUM as a technology however is doing _extremely_ well in converged teleco
core networks where a locally cached ENUM infrastructure is used for number
translations. 

The poster child for this is Verizon. Here is a presentation from SIPNOC. 

http://www.sipforum.org/component/option,com_docman/task,doc_download/gid,49
1/Itemid,261/

This is the SS7/TCAP replacement market. There are lots of ENUM based
federations out there providing competitive carrier interconnections and
it's a core technology defined as part of IMS 3GPP GSMA/IR67 etc. 

There is unfinished work for those that need to use ENUM technology in
converged IP networks, but this is more of a teleco specific issue than a
generalized Internet issue. It is also highly relevant to national numbering
administrations that are looking for converged LNP solutions. The Dutch and
the COIN database folks have done a great job here on that issue. The
situation in the UK, for instance, is a total disaster.  In the US we are
just rolling along ripping out TDM Class 5 switches whenever possible and
giving our national regulator a huge migraine trying to define what is
Interconnected VoIP. 

There is lots of talk on this side of the pond on enabling HD-Voice on
converged networks. 

The metadata issue is not going away and SPID-Interconnection issue will
heat up shortly.  See you in Quebec City.

-----Original Message-----
From: enum-wg-admin at ripe.net [mailto:enum-wg-admin at ripe.net] On Behalf Of
Jim Reid
Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2011 12:20 PM
To: RIPE ENUM WG
Subject: [enum-wg] market potential/future for public ENUM

On 1 Jun 2011, at 16:55, Otmar Lendl wrote:

> Our experience in Austria has been that an ENUM service independent  
> of the
> PSTN operator for the phone number has almost no market potential.

Indeed. Though this is not just an Austrian experience. It appears to  
be a universal one. I think it's very hard to find any success story  
for ENUM on the Internet. Public ENUM is essentially dead. Apart  
(maybe) for phone numbers in blocks associated with VoIP operators.  
But even there, some of those operators are relying on termination  
fees for incoming calls from the PSTN. So they'd prefer their  
customers to have tel: URLs instead of sip: URLs. Which kind of  
defeats the point.

I think it's time this WG considered its future. The IETF WG has  
closed down. That should be a very clear hint.