Nowhere to hide
A new technology can use one number to find you on any device: cell phone, pager or personal computer.
| Technology uses one number to find you on any device
By John Borland Say goodbye to missed connections. Imagine being able to reach a person anywhere simply by typing in a single telephone number on the Internet. The message could be sent to any possible point of contact: cell phone, e-mail, instant messenger, voice mail or any other form of electronic communication.
This kind of white pages on steroids is one goal of a new technology being tested by some major Internet and telephone
But even at this nascent stage, a battle has begun among various encampments struggling to lay a foundation for a global communications system that plays to their advantage. The issue has exposed a byzantine world where international regulators, public utilities, Internet agencies, corporate powerhouses and local carriers all have conflicting agendas. "There are hundreds of millions of dollars in potential annual revenues here," possibly for a single company, Gartner analyst David Fraley said. "Anything with a lot of (potential) business is going to be hotly contested." The Enum technology is in large part the brainchild of a Swedish Cisco Systems engineer named Patrik Faltstrom, who wanted to clear a frustrating clutter of pagers, e-mail accounts, cell phones, office phones, home phones, and instant messengers. If all these points of communication could use a single number, the world would be a much simpler place, Faltstrom and fellow engineers believed. The result of their work was the Enum standard, which was approved by a committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) last year. At its core, the technology would plug telephone numbers into the same address system that Web sites now use, ensuring that computers on the Internet could understand "1-202-555-1212" as well as "www.news.com." This prospect is particularly encouraging to Internet-phone proponents, who say it would allow old telephone networks and new voice-over-the-Internet services to talk to each other much more easily. "This is not going to put the phone companies out of business," said Richard Shockey, a NeuStar executive who co-chairs the task force committee that worked on the Enum standard. "But the reason there's so much interest in this is that it would finally integrate the voice and data networks."
Building new applications on top of the basic Enum infrastructure would be the way to achieve the primary goal of its creators. Instead of bringing up a Web page, the Enum
That directory could include all possible contact information for a given person, from e-mail addresses to various phone numbers. The information could be used to create an online switchboard that would route calls, e-mail or any other communication whichever way that person wished to be contacted. For example, it could block calls from certain numbers, send telemarketer solicitations to voice mail, reroute business calls to e-mail, and allow calls from family members to take top priority. As with so many other growing technologies, however, Enum's progress is tied to the titans battling for a stake in the new system. Given the complicated relationships needed to make Enum a success, the question of who runs all the necessary directories and databases is a brutally difficult one. Unlike domain names, telephone numbers are parceled out according to meticulous regulations country by country, and a different set of companies oversees each system. VeriSign and other smaller Net companies manage the ".com" domain and sell names to people online, for instance, while Virginia-based NeuStar manages the U.S. telephone number databases. For the last several months, telephone and Net companies have been fighting over whether the Enum system should look more like the world of domain names or the government-regulated, tightly controlled system of telephone numbers. The issues largely revolve around who will get to run the big databases that store all the pointers to personal information associated with Enum telephone numbers. Much of the debate has taken place in quiet meetings in Washington and Europe over the past few months, where the interests of companies and national governments are being weighed.
Major telephone companies such as AT&T and WorldCom have gotten involved, mostly seeking
Even within the United States, it is unclear who has the authority to make final decisions. The State Department, the Commerce Department and the Federal Communications Commission all are participating in the process, which has quickly become a political headache. Several companies have already begun trials of the technology, in part as a way to show they can handle the business if it ever gets off the ground. NeuStar and VeriSign, each of which wants to run the central databases of any new system, have their own test projects. VeriSign has gone one step further, offering a "complementary" version of the service that allows WebNum domain names such as "555-1212" that can be used on wireless phones to surf Web sites. The company says it is trying to make surfing simpler on wireless phones, on which letters are difficult to type. At the same time, it is paving the way toward making itself known for handling telephone numbers. Because of the politics surrounding the issue, even some longtime backers of Internet telephony are taking a wait-and-see approach to the technology's potential. "I do believe there is a huge potential for Enum-enabled applications," Jeff Pulver, one of the early proponents of Internet telephony, wrote in an e-mail interview. However, he added, "This is more dependent on the ability to execute on the vision than the vision itself." Nevertheless, even the competing companies involved say the political hurdles are surmountable.
"The opportunity is that we accelerate convergence around the world," said Matthew Wald, NeuStar's vice president of IP services. "Convergence isn't a matter of if; it's a matter of when." |  | | |  "Enum" competition pits phone industry against Internet start-ups The Washington Post IETF spec could propel Internet telephony Network World Telcordia, VeriSign to marry telephone, Net numbers Network World ENUM World news room ENUM World ENUM reference material The Enum golden tree DNS: Enum Washington Internet project ITU Enum activities International Telecommunication Union
Yahoo charges for Net phone calls Web's major registrar turns phone numbers into Net names House panel criticizes ICANN domain selection Device to link home phones directly to Net2Phone VoiceStream to offer wireless keyword search | ||||
numbers would read an electronic directory for whomever owns a given telephone number.
a system with a central place where information can be stored. Such a system would prevent a situation in which multiple companies compete for customers, resulting in the kind of confusion that followed the breakup of Ma Bell in the 1980s.
