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. The software you're using to contact me can then work out the best common protocol to use for talking with me. This can include least call routing in the decision process as well, as already mentioned. The other useful (and also confusing) thing with ENUM is you can have regular expressions. So I could have one record for the entire number range at work which says how to translate that into the required SIP URL to contact each phone.
We already have identifiers on the Internet - email addresses - so why we would choose to carry over cryptic strings of digits from an antiquated system and use those for one communication medium - while continuing to use email addresses as the identifiers for others - escapes me.
I'm still amazed at the number of (mostly small) businesses that I deal with that have ISP domain names in their email addresses. Which seems antiquated to me! -- Andrew Ruthven Wellington, New Zealand At home: andrew(a)etc.gen.nz | This space intentionally | left blank.