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

--On Thursday, June 02, 2011 17:18 +0200 Patrik Fältström
<paf at cisco.com> wrote:

> On 2 jun 2011, at 17.12, Richard Shockey wrote:
> 
>> Patrik is right.  It really is a competition issue. What I'm
>> sure of is that E.164 is NOT going away anytime soon despite
>> what our IETF colleagues think.
> 
> It is going away from the minds of people. People have the
> E.164 in their address books etc, and even though E.164 is
> used for the actual dialing, it is less and less important
> what the number is, that you can keep your number etc.
> 
> It is there in some vcard that you pass around, and it could
> as well include a SIP address or whatever.
> 
> The importance is fast going away.
>...
> People invent new services, and then the question is what
> identifier one should use.
> 
> Incumbents that do have E.164 numbers of course want to use
> them.
> 
> Others do not want to use E.164 numbers.
>...

This is, of course, consistent with another industry trend, even
in the E.164 PSTN and closely-related spaces.  A few decades
ago, people typically had two phone numbers: "work" and "home".
The second was often shared (e.g., with other family members);
the first one might be (with coworkers or a main switchboard).
Now we've got multiple numbers associated with different media
(a mobile phone or two), services (PSTN and VoIP and fax),
sometimes numbers in different countries or areas to save
callers toll charges, and so on.  And, of course, there are
other services -- e.g., email, IM, non-E.164-VoIP services --
that don't normally use E.164 numbers at all.    If a
correspondent has more than a handful of contact point
identities, it becomes rapidly clear that one wants to reach a
particular person or function, not a long-obsolete surrogate for
a copper pair and whomever happens to be standing close to its
terminal.

In the current world, E.164-style numbers have exactly one major
user advantage over other types of identifiers and that is that
all-numeric strings survive internationalization with far less
trouble and confusion than alphanumeric identifiers.  Other than
that, the competition comments apply -- all of the advantages go
to the incumbent holders of those numbers and, perhaps, the
manufacturers of older-style terminals (those that, unlike the
more common devices Patrik mentions, don't support address
books).

If someone asked me where to make a big investment in the hope
of seeing a large ROI these days, it wouldn't be in E.164
numbers, especially public-tree ones.   The opportunity might
have been there for a while to make them really useful, but a
variety of factors and institutions conspired to let that window
close by trying to hold on to old, PSTN-dominated, ways of doing
things.

     john