[enum-wg] The ENUM Federation: activities, website etc.

On 27.08.2012 17:23, Torsten Schlabach wrote:
>> there is at least one crucial thing that might actually hinder a 
>> massive take-up in registration figures
>
> There are at least two other ones:
>
> - Unless the Telco regulators in each country would enforce ENUM 
> lookup *combined* with rules on pricing (one has to be careful to ask 
> for both; see Austria for example) ENUM will not mean anything to 
> anyone out there in the field.
>
> - As long as there is no QoS at all available to the average home or 
> small / medium business user open VoIP is not going to happen, 
> unfortunately. Again, this may be a regulatory issue.

this is IMHO "only" an issue if the ENUM focus is narrowed down to exclusively be a PSTN replacement, saving on phone fees. Personally speaking, I saw this argument going away when more and more telcos started to offer flat fees for at least domestic landline termination. 
For me, it's more about new and unseen services: I know of a test case where, based on ENUM, photos could be sent as an MMS to landline numbers to appear on eg. picture screens.
[RS> ] 
[RS> ]  Well the discussions about industry wide Carrier ENUM in North America are moving pretty well.  Both Canada and the US have regulatory moves to turn off classic TDM based POTS and move to all SIP/IMS networks. Cable has led the transitions, enterprise SIP Trunking and now VoLTE G 722 AMR-WB are the drivers for the new numbering databases. ENUM is also being used successfully in advances services for the hearing impaired.  This is the Video Relay Service using the iTRS ENUM database run by the US Federal Communications Commission.    



> I am actually suprised to still see you guys working. I have been an 
> ENUM enthusiast when it came up, but went away when it turned out it's 
> just not going to happen. AFAIK, some delegations have already been 
> passed back to the ITU just because those who had them found out they 
> don't need / don't want them any more.
>
> Looking at
> https://confluence.terena.org/display/NRENum/NRENum.net+service :
>
> I guess nobody here cares for a list of ENUM trees for this, that and 
> the other. Also when it says "It's not about free calls, it's about 
> new services", could anyone come up with a real live example?

See above. And I won't be surprised at all if the NREN community will be showcasing new ENUM based services shortly to mid term.

> I know two types of people: Skype users who for the sake of it being 
> free accept it's unreliability and couldn't care less about it's 
> non-openness and people who seldom make calls abroad and have a 
> flatrate on their GSM handset. That's 98,5% of the telco voice market. 
> I hate to say it but it's reality.

No counter-argueing here... :-)

> Wasn't there also some system where one would dial 12345 * 67890 where 
> 67890 would be treated like a domain and 12345 would be the "local 
> part" of that phone number?

Not sure what you mean.

> Well, also phone numbers become less and less interesting as people 
> dial contacts on their Smartphone which they sync from their contacts 
> lists anywhere in the cloud. Why don't we just turn to H.323 and use
> IPv6 addresses as phone numbers if we think we want VoIP.

Not everybody is in a position to use sophisticated smart phones with this, that and the other on board. A larger portion of the global population still uses plain simple mobiles or even landline phones with rotary dialers. We'd be IMHO well advised to not hook them off by replacing long standing identification schemes with something that is only available to a small subset of people.

All the best,

	Carsten Schiefner