Rural Telephone Service WorkshopUTC invites comments on rural telephone service.

Rural Telephone Service Workshop
UTC invites comments on rural telephone service. Workshop will be August 17, 2006. Docket No. 061116.

ENUM, Numbers and URIs, VoIP and the PSTN or: N...

ENUM, Numbers and URIs, VoIP and the PSTN

or: Netheads and Bellheads

or: Incumbent Telcos against Incumbent Cable Operators

The recent decision in the US to go for ENUM +1 (speading like wildfire over the blogger community) will definitely boost the ENUM deployment worldwide. Although for ENUM at least many ENUM trials existed (more or less advanced) in Europe and also in Asia, the US was not even delegated in e164.arpa. Many ENUM sceptics therefore asked the perfectly valid question: What about the NANP? As long as ENUM is not deployed in the US, it will not fly. This argument may now go away.

The revival of ENUM, but also the recent developments regarding DUNDi and GNUP also revitalized the discussion if VoIP and especially SIP should use numbers or URIs. A lot of bloggers are throwing their two cents worth on the numbering issue in VoIP and ENUM.

Starting with Chris Holland Numbers are so 1849, also Robert Sanders Number of the Beast (still pointing to RFC2916 instead of RFC3761 for ENUM) and ending with Answaths Numbering and Addressing in VoIP: Wag the Dog?

Answath's article is analyzing the recent history quite well and he draws the following conclusion: "So there is only one reason for sticking to E.164 numbers - the industry is lazy or risk averse in trying to change the UI of the terminal. So as advocates of VoIP, we should strive for improved UI for the terminals and insist on URI based dialing (which will marginalize the service providers). Oh, by the way, do everything to encourage your circle of friend to migrate to VoIP. This means you should not subscribe to additional virtual numbers, because this will take away the economical motivation to get VoIP."

This is IMHO reaching to a bit too short, numbers will be around for other reasons quite a while. Rich Shockey is giving in his presentations a bunch of other reasons. Also insisting as provider or manufacturer on something your customers do not really want is not productive.

But the last sentence is very interesting: "This means you should not subscribe to additional virtual numbers, because this will take away the economical motivation to get VoIP" - but in a different sense. This comes back the full circle to my previous arguments:

Providing virtual VoIP services just as PSTN replacement is NOT the future business. But the real gold nugget in Answath's article is the following statement:

How come a Nethead turns into a Bellhead when placed in the voice environment?

This is the best statement I have heard in the last weeks (and I have heard many, being at the VON), because it explains an issue I was wondering recently:

How come that virtual VoIP Service providers (I considered them netheads up to now) start begging for regulation?

Answer: because they got infected and started to turn into Bellheads. Especially the European VoIP services providers lead by ITSPA and heavily supported by ECTA are fighting to keep the incumbents out of the VoIP game by declaring VoIP to be just another technology for the old PSTN voice service (= the incuments have also significant market power there) and therefore also the related remedies (e.g. they are not allowed to bundle their services).

In addition they are getting greedy, because they finally got the message of the advantages of interconnect (= getting termination charges), which is working only with numbers. They are starting to dislike public URIs and ENUM, because for ENUM you need an URI to point to, and start to get attracted by DUNDi, GNUP and other closed Carrier "ENUM" solutions.

This is IMHO a big mistake for two reasons:

1. VoIP as PSTN replacement in a shrinking market is not the communication of the future, it is convergence, as I already stated:
-convergence in the access: triple play
-convergence at the customers device: OnePhone
-convergence at the service and application level: Office 2003, LCS 2005 and Istanbul

So they should try to get their money in providing really innovative services and not mimic the old PSTN services.

2. The real battle is anyway going on somewhere else. These little providers are only taken hostage by ETCA to support lobbying in the battle between the incumbent telcos and the incumbent cable operators and the battleground is triple play.

In most countries the cable operators are not considered (like the incument telcos) to have SMP, so they do not need to provide bit-stream unbundling, ULL and may bundle TV, Internet Access and Voice Services without any remidies and they want to keep it that way.

Simon Hampton, Chair ECTA Broadband Group last week in Brussels wanted remedies for
telco incumbents for (some statements):

-Bundling of bitstream and PSTN subscription
-Quitting PSTN subscription is a pre-requisite for number portability
- Unbundled / Naked bitstream needed
-Bundling PSTN access and calls
-Bundles of call minutes could be disguised predation
-Retail regulation may be necessary

And of course the best one: VoIP is a fixed-line substitute, whereas mobile is a complement.

Now this is a nice one, considering the recent developments in GSM/WiFi convergence.

Guess the real affiliation from Simon Hampton: Time/Warner ;-)

Richard