LERG, meet DNS...

"Bit heads" and "Bell Heads" have, by nature, trouble seeing eye-to-eye. The whole idea of Voice over IP is anathema to some who think in terms of physical trunks, number plans and so forth.

Now, ENUM (the worldwide numbering authority) is pursuing a new project that promises to bridge the gap ... and I mention it here because it makes an important point: That 'location' can be determined using decades-old web technologies, and propell the concept of Local Number Portability far into the future.

First, a little background. When you pointed your browser to this page, your browser did a little sleight-of-hand. It turned a web address (say, www.atso.com) into an IP address (64.243.114.17) -- keeping you from having to remember an awkard set of numbers, and giving us the flexibility to move the web site to another server without having to inform everybody. In fact, all we do is tell certain servers (called DNS, for Domain Name Server) of the change, and that's it... The results seamlessly propagate around the globe to anyone who wants to know where "www.atso.com" resides. The same hold for other servers (or sub-domains) in our domain, say simcall.technologies.products.wayne.nj.atso.com... don't bother looking that one up!

So, what ENUM is proposing is to do the same thing for telephone numbers. Think of a phone number - 973-696-0990, being turned into something like 1.9.7.3.6.9.6.0.9.9.0.arpa.net - and you see what's up. Suddenly a phone number looks suspiciously like a web address, and the DNS-world can take over, telling the world where you are, which services you have, and who your telecom carrier is. Given a front-end to this system (which is, by nature, dispersed), you, the end-user could update your own records, allowing you to have one-number, forwarded to any of your 'services' you desire: e-mail, voice mail, VOIP, cell phone, etc...

It's a trend worth watching, because if it takes off, we'll see the further degradation of area codes and prefixes meaning anything remotely geographic. It will also mean that new data sources will emerge to be the authoritative source of which company "owns" which customer, and that will have far-reaching repercussions in the areas of Interconnection compensation and routing. Today's Local Exchange Routing Guide (or LERG) will no longer help much in routing calls, or classifying traffic as belonging to a particular carrier.

For more information, check out:

An overview of the ENUM committee
http://www.enumf.org/

An overview of the "TN numbers homed in a DNS server" project:
http://www.enumf.org/documents/6000_1_0.pdf