[AusNOG] Phone Numbers in Australia

[Nick Stallman]

I always thought the E.164 to DNS mapping would have been really cool.
Extremely flexible call routing, nearly instantly portable, no lock in 
and even free calls, just like domain names.

Pity the free calls bit means no telco is going to willingly implement 
it, even if it would make things far easier for them.

Wikipedia says Australia trialled it in 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164#DNS_mapping_of_E.164_numbers


On 01/05/18 09:29, Mark Delany wrote:
> 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.
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-- 
Nick Stallman
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