Uncategorized

ENUM Status 2005

by  •  • 3 Comments

As we near the end of 2005, what is the status of ENUM? The original RFCs were published in 2000 I believe.

Is there a single commercial VoIP provider that supports the official e164.arpa ENUM? If they do, they certainly don’t promote it or mention it anywhere on their web sites that I can find. Vonage, AT&T CallVantage, Packet8, Broadvoice, SunRocket? Anyone?

Of course to support ENUM, they would first have to support interoperable IP to IP calling, by SIP address, or otherwise. Again, few if any of the providers make any mention of this on their site or in their documentation. Some appear to have at least some limited support for placing or receiving calls over IP, but it’s difficult to determine if it is intentional and a supported feature or simply a side-effect.

The only thing that will change things is consumer demand. As long as we let the providers remain closed walled gardens, they will. So much for the IP revolution.

3 comments for “ENUM Status 2005”

  1. Hi David,

    you are basically correct, the major problem in ENUM is that most providers do not give you a SIP URI, so you cannot use ENUM in the first place.

    The second problem is that User ENUM is commercially available only in Austria and very limited in Germany.

    I have a DSL line providing me a VoIP service on my geographic number, the number is in ENUM and I also have a SIP URI (query +4319793321). The provider is also querying ENUM first before dumping the call to the PSTN. The problem is only, there is nobody there, only some Austrian numbers. We also have a number range +43780 exclusively for ENUM (calls are routed to an ENUM enabled gateway in Austria,and everybody may subscribe via some regisrars) but the number range is blocked in most countries.

    As long as the US is not moving forward, there will be a problem.

    There is now some hope that ENUM gets some traction again with Carrier ENUM.

    best regards
    Richard

  2. "As we near the end of 2005, what is the status of ENUM? The original RFCs were published in 2000 I believe."

    The last IETF meeting saw discussion of how to adapt ENUM for use by VoIP providers. There are many policy reasons (in different countries) for why this cannot occur with ENUM as originally envisioned, and authorized by the ITU/IETF/etc.

    "Is there a single commercial VoIP provider that supports the official e164.arpa ENUM?"

    You may wish to ask the US Govt why there is not yet an official delegation of 1.e164.arpa.

    "Of course to support ENUM, they would first have to support interoperable IP to IP calling, by SIP address, or otherwise. Again, few if any of the providers make any mention of this on their site or in their documentation."

    Perhaps so, but many of these companies are showing up at VON, IETF, and the ENUM Forum voicing interest in doing this. Notable exceptions are the smaller ITSPs, as well as Vonage.

Comments are closed.