On 2008-12-29, at 13:56, Joe Abley wrote:
However, so long as telcos maintain effective control over the E.164 number plan and have no commercial reason to modify their existing interconnect tariffs (or to allow their subscribers to be called in ways that don't use their network) it seems clear that such a thing will never happen.
On 2008-12-29, at 19:01, Mark Harris wrote:
We (and I mainly mean Michael but also Keith and Jordan and others) worked hard to persuade the telcos that it was a Good Thing(tm) but the TCF is where the process got bogged down. They kept saying 'yes, we must do a test' but never when or how.
I suppose I could interpret your description of the TCF's reaction to the idea as simple telephantitude, but it also doesn't seem especially outrageous to read both paragraphs above as saying the same thing. I was not involved, but I hear that in North America there was a tremendous amount of layer-9 activity surrounding the creation of a testbed registry for 1.e164.arpa -- presumably far more than would ever be required for 4.6.e164.arpa, given that +1 includes several countries. The testbed registry was created, at CIRA in Ottawa. As far as I know, it remains empty, some years later. From Michael's comments in this thread it sounds like some thought has been put into how end users might be enticed to use a +64 enum registry which seems very pragmatic and sensible. Perhaps such pragmatism and grass-roots efforts were not a feature of the +1 deployment. It does seem possible, however, that in this case the ship has sailed on enum. I've never seen a device marketed to users directly which uses enum, for example, but I do see them today using skype. The other day my two sisters in the UK were evidently having trouble getting in touch with each other as they drove across the country in opposite directions trying to converge on a restaurant somewhere round the M25 for lunch. One of them had changed her GSM number some time ago without bothering to tell anybody. They both managed to get in touch with each other using Facebook from their cellphones. The lack of an E.164 number was not, in their case, a barrier to communication. Perhaps the importance of phone numbers is dwindling, and enum, no matter how enthusiastically promoted, will be dragged down with them. Joe