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September 08, 2005
Guest Blogger: Vint Cerf, SVP Technology Strategy, MCI
US ENUM TRIAL
In a recent letter to the County Code 1 ENUM LLC, chaired by MCI’s Karen Mulberry, US Ambassador to the ITU, David Gross, encouraged progress on a trial of the ENUM system for associating telephone numbers with the Domain Name System (specifically the e164.arpa portion of the domain name space). The letter needs to be read in the context of a trial that takes place in the +1 telephone country code space, shared by the US, Canada, and seventeen other nations in the Northern Hemisphere.
Among the many who have contributed vision and leadership towards this end, Karen should be singled out as a driving force behind this effort. Karen has persevered on the long road leading to this stage of ENUM’s birth in the US.
Ambassador Gross lays out a framework within which the trial is to be conducted. Because the trial is relevant to all the nations sharing country code 1, consultations within the USG including FCC, NTIA, the State Department among others, led to the formulation of this framework and its expression by Ambassador Gross partly to assure our sister users of +1 that the effort will be carried out in a responsible fashion.
If I had any quibble about the framework, I guess it would revolve around the restrictions on who is allowed to participate and which +1 telephone numbers can be introduced into the 1.e164.arpa portion of the domain name system. As the trial gets under way, I hope that expansion of participation to include willing members of the general public might be considered. Plainly, it would be important to assure (and to test!) methods to prevent unauthorized entries in the 1.e164.arpa data base. Failure to verify such preventative measures could lead to “hijacking” of phone calls intended for one party but vectored onto the Internet to an unintended interloper. The conservative framework is plainly intended to reassure everyone that the trial is to be conducted with the protection of users in mind. It would be constructive to find a way to test also the mechanics of registration and protection so that by the end of the trial, we would have some idea of and confidence in the mechanisms for registration for ENUM service by users directly or by others on their behalf.
There is a substantial amount of reporting and planning built into the framework offered by Ambassador Gross, so this will require a concerted effort by the participants in the trial. The experience gained and so documented will be valuable.
It is worth noting that many were skeptical that such a trial could be devised in the context of a multi-national sharing of country code +1 and it is a tribute to all those who have worked so hard to make ENUM a reality in the US that the effort has reached this point. I congratulate Karen Mulberry and her colleagues and thank Ambassador Gross, and his colleagues in the USG for their support and encouragement.
Vint Cerf
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Posted by jeff on September 8, 2005 05:31 AM | Permalink
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