Who Wants to run ENUM in the UK?

By the time you read this, all the would-be's will have submitted their proposals to be the "Tier 1" ENUM provider for the UK, or in other words they will get to run the ENUM domain for country '44', known as 4.4.e164.arpa.

If the significance of ENUM passed you by, this is a system linked into DNS (the Internet Domain Name Service) that allows telephone numbers to be mapped to a variety of Internet information such as a SIP URI. In a world where the SIP URI (e.g. mickeymouse [!at] disney.com (replace the [!at] with a @)) may one day be the primary identifier, it will still be useful for "legacy phone" systems to map that URI to a dialable number, e.g. +441793...

This is where ENUM comes in, allowing a lookup service between the two worlds of telephony.

The next step for UK ENUM is (as Captain Jack Sparrow might say) "parley", before an announcement will be made in the June time frame. Detail on the proposal documents and timeline for the process can be found at the UK Enum Consortium Website.

Reply from dibsmft on Mar 04, 2007 - 10:29 PM

ENUM does seem to be a good idea. I am registered (home phone number) with E164.org and it does work. However, I have not used it much because the people I call and the voip providers I use are not registered! At the private user level there is unlikely to be much money to be made (a guess!) but at the business level it should be profitable. I suppose if voipuser was registered it could route outgoing calls to voip if the recipient was ENUM registered - much in the way that voxalot works.

Reply from dean on Mar 05, 2007 - 12:04 PM

Quote:

I suppose if voipuser was registered it could route outgoing calls to voip if the recipient was ENUM registered - much in the way that voxalot works.

We are, and we have done that in the past (and in fact we're running ENUM again now, but our own server). The problem with ENUM is it's not ready, in the main because of a lack of a single authority which is now being addressed.

I don't personally care who runs it, as long as it's run well. There have been lots of fights recently over the management of DNS but at the end of the day it works and no-one gets ripped off. That's the main thing.

When we can query a single authority DNS server for ENUM records then it will become a workable system. Networks like e164.org are a stepping stone and proof of concept, but not a long term workable system (it's impractical for every telco to have to submit requests to many non-authority nameservers).

Dean

Reply from Moonrakre on Mar 06, 2007 - 10:02 AM

The problem I find is that some voip providers, e.g. sipgate, block it. They are likely to lose money if enum becomes universal because if you are on sipgate and you want to dial one of my enum listed numbers from your enum enabled asterisk they don't collect the call charge.

Personally I have found this really good when testing an incoming setup with autoattendance because I can dial my own number and it connects directly through the incoming (DID) routing.

If you have Asterisk or Trixbox one of our members posted this link on how to set up some time ago:
http://www.geek-pages.com/articles/asterisk/setting_up_enum_for_outbound_calls_on_asterisk_at_home.html
and it works.

Best wishes

Adrian

Reply from dean on Mar 06, 2007 - 10:24 AM

Quote:

They are likely to lose money if enum becomes universal because if you are on sipgate and you want to dial one of my enum listed numbers from your enum enabled asterisk they don't collect the call charge.

In your example Sipgate would actually make more money. What ENUM means for a carrier is they don't have to pay (or pay less) in routing the call. They still charge their customer.

The outcome of carrier ENUM will be more competitively priced routes which ultimately will mean more competitive pricing for the consumer.

Dean

Reply from kieranmulen on Mar 21, 2007 - 07:13 AM

Asterisk should have auto enum registration on all asterisk servers. (with the option to turn it off of course) It would be much better if there were more users. I think trixbox has an easy option for end users to enable. I think it should be auto enabled because I assume that the majority of the users of asterisk (not all) are smaller companies that would greatly benefit from it.

of course larger companies would benefit from something like thevpf.com I wonder what the smallest company they will deal with?

KieranMullen

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