On 31 Dec 2008, at 15:18, Andrew Ruthven wrote:
On Wed, 2008-12-31 at 11:44 +1300, Jasper Bryant-Greene wrote:
How about I just tell you my "phone number" is freddie(a)beer.com, your software looks up "_sip._udp.beer.com. IN SRV", and places a call to freddie at the server returned by that record. It's an optimised, point-to-point connection, and it doesn't involve carrying over antiquities like PSTN phone numbers.
Because that is a solution to a different problem. That says for a domain, you can use SIP to contact some SIP endpoint (what happens for a business? reception only?), whereas in ENUM you can have a number of different technologies associated with a "phone number". For example, SIP, H.323, email, IM, http, carrier pigeon roost, PSTN, etc.
No, I think it's the same problem. There's nothing stopping additional SRV records being present to provide other contact methods. The details of the functionality available to meet the requirements no doubt differ, but the basic requirements are the same. The problem space for businesses is surely identical to that of residences, if you consider the core functionality to be "signal a method to contact a particular person or role". sip:noc(a)isc.org calls phones to ring on many peoples' desks; sip:jabley(a)isc.org just rings my phone. mailto:noc(a)isc.org sends mail in a way that those same people can see it; mailto:jabley(a)isc.org is for contacting just me. If we concede that we are not yet living in the future and hence need a "front desk number", no doubt we can think up a generic role for that, info(a)isc.org or somehting. Perspectives which start from the basis of "how do I establish a voice connection to +1 519 670 9327" seem antiquated to me. Remove the baggage, and it's "how has Joe signalled that I should contact him?" The fact that we will no doubt need to maintain E.164 hooks into the system for the benefit of people who can't use any identifier other than a phone number does not mean that the directory service needs to revolve around arbitrary numeric strings. Joe