Telephone numbers, domain names, and ENUMbers
McTaggart, C.
Communications Magazine, IEEE
Volume 40, Issue 9, Sep 2002 Page(s): 26 -
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCOM.2002.1031827
Summary:One of the biggest barriers to the development of public IP
telephony services has been the lack of a universal addressing system.
While IP-enabled devices have long been capable of originating phone and
fax calls, it is difficult to "call" an IP device because they are hard
to find. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments
(RFC) 2916, "E.164 Number and DNS," seeks to solve this problem in a
simple and perhaps unlikely way. Simple, in that the ENUM protocol
converts existing telephone numbers into domain names.The designers of
ENUM hope to foster a global megadirectory of communications users who
can be reached in any number of ways by means of only one number. While
theoretically any character space could be standardized in an attempt to
create a universal addressing scheme, ENUM explicitly adopts telephone
numbers, presumably to take advantage of their global user acceptance
and mature infrastructure. This choice adds a significant public policy
dimension to the story. Far from being benign and boring, telephone
numbers can present significant communications policy issues, and are
regulated both domestically and internationally. The top level of this
hierarchy is defined by International Telecommunication
Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Recommendation
E.164
View citation and abstract |
Cart
