[AusNOG] Phone Numbers in Australia

[Mark Delany]

On 30Apr18, Matthew Moyle-Croft allegedly wrote:
> Historically we???ve had numbers that are geo based for landlines (02, 03, 08 etc) and other numbers that delineate the cost to call (eg. 04 for mobile, 13/18 for fixed cost non-geo or free, 1900 for ???premium??? etc). But we???re now looking to a future where a range of factors are meaning that the differentiation is less meaningful.

(Not sure whether this is strictly a nogger topic, but interesting
nonetheless).

It's a shame that geo numbers are falling into disuse as people like
the location information conveyed with a number as well as the
txt-capability feature advertised with 04/05 too.

These two preferences along with the ultimate decline towards zero in
voice and txt revenue seem like an opportunity to "re-invent" this
address space as it is one of only two globally federated address
spaces - and thus *extremely* rare and valuable.

But like you I doubt very much whether any innovation will
occur. Apart from the current cash-cow issue, probably the biggest
problems are:

  a) any change has to come via the glacially slow Telco standards
     bodies

  b) implementation is now largely in the hards of vendors which
     supply and manage an ever increasing number of phone networks on
     behalf of Telcos (cf Ericsson and Telstra).

     Unfortunately telco vendors are as much fans of federated
     solutions as all the failed messaging products and services we
     see on the Internet... which is to say, not at all.

  c) The revenue problem: Telcos never implement anything unless there
     is a very strong link to revenue. A rich and open address-space
     is not that thing by a long-shot (cf email).

  d) Telcos thus far control the destiny of phone numbers and they
     view their exclusive rights as not-over-my-dead-body turf. Even
     if they don't know how to leverage it they are right to worry
     that others might know - thus further eating into their revenue
     streams. They would much rather a dead address space than handing
     it over to innovation.

My fantasy is a revivified ENUM which advertises features/capabilities
for a given number - perhaps with carrier-only access to minimize
abuse.

But on past experience the telcos never even managed to deal with the
most trivial feature-discontinuity issue between mobile and landlines
(cf mobile address-space in the US) or txt and mms. That track-record
suggests that the prospect of reliably enhancing this address-space
are less than zero.


But don't get me started :-)


Mark.