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

--On Tuesday, August 28, 2012 11:34 +0100 Jim Reid
<jim at rfc1035.com> wrote:

> On 27 Aug 2012, at 15:56, Carsten Schiefner wrote:
> 
>> As you may be aware, I have had some multilateral, but also  
>> bilateral talks with some of you wrt. the ENUM Federation and
>>  particularly its website at:
>> 
>> 	http://www.enumfederation.org/
>> 
>> As I got it, there have recently some ideas been floated
>> around   amongst the BoD members about a very last attempt to
>> give the idea   behind the Federation a push.
>...
> Carsten, I wish you and the ENUM Federation every success.
> However I fear you're flogging a very dead horse. User ENUM is
> dead. If the ENUM Federation can bring it back to life, good
> luck! If the ENUM Federation can do that, could you please
> revive the hamburger meat in my fridge and turn it back into a
> live cow again? :-)
> 
> IMO "ownership" of an E.164 number has not been a significant
> factor in getting User ENUM to fly. Besides, I very much doubt
> regulators or telcos will be receptive to requests to change
> current practice which has stood for decades. I would be
> delighted to be proven wrong. One niche that might be
> exploited is 3G dongles. These have E.164 numbers (for SMS
> spam from the provider) but no telephony service as such. I've
> no idea how ENUM could be used with them though.
>...

Hi.

Jim and I have a slightly different (but not contradictory) list
of reasons why user ENUM failed or never got traction but,
otherwise, +1.

In the long term, that is probably A Good Thing for users and
the Internet.  Except for an interesting (and unresolved)
internationalization issue, ENUM mostly makes more sense as a
transition strategy than as a permanent arrangement.   That is
for precisely the reasons Jim mentions: E.164 is, in practice,
heavily tied to long-standing operational practices, business
models. assumptions about "ownership", and other characteristics
of the PSTN that don't map nicely onto the Internet (or any
other network based on flexible routing of datagrams).  To the
extent to which we focus on user ENUM (or E.164 generally) as an
important element of the Internet going forward, we encourage
such things as assumptions or debates about why ITU should have
control over peering and routing policies and perhaps even
authorization of carriers and services.  I hope we all
understand why we don't want to go there.

>From a slightly different point of view, user ENUM has not been
a failure but a brilliant success for the key element of its
design.  It institutionalized the TPC (Internet fax) model and
showed how it was possible to have an effective and public
mechanism that used mostly-conventional Internet tools at the
VoIP - PSTN boundary.  It would have been quite bad had we not
been able to show proof of concept at that boundary.  But, if
the long-term result is that people use VoIP and other
Internet-based mechanisms for communication in preference to the
PSTN or gateways to the PSTN, that is success, not cause for
worrying about bringing user ENUM back to life.

Just my opinion, of course.
    john