VoIP and ENUM

Immediately after the IETF in Montreal I went on vacation in this farm until now:



Some may wonder why I posted this picture so late, but you should know that my only Internet connectivity was via mobile GPRS and it took so long to upload the picture ;-)

I found a webpage explaining politics in the style of "Sendung mit der Maus" (in German), also containing the audios. It is written like a blog, containing an entry every 4 month or so, starting march 2001.

It starts with: "Das ist der Herr Bush. Sieht eigentlich ganz nett aus. Isser aber nicht. ..."

It also contains at the end some further links, one to Thomas Wolf, which points to this video

Basically I still cannot believe it, because I think they are too stupid to plan such a large thing and keep it secret up to now.

On the other hand ...

Jon Stewart from The Daily Show lets Sen. Ted Stevens explain the Internet:

"It is not a truck, it is a series of tubes, and if you do not understand how these tubes can be filled, and if they are filled when you put your message in, it gets in line, its gonna be delayed by anyone who puts in in that tube enourmous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material!"

And the result:

"Ten movies streaming across that, that, Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I ... just the other day, got Internet, was sent by my staff at 10 0'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why?"

He also lets Sen. Frank Wolf explain why gambling on the Internet is so dangerous (I reported on this here):

"With on-line gambling you can do it in your bath room!"

And finally Jon Stewart also finds an explanation why betting on horses and state lotteries are not banned: They are not clogging and even cleaning up the clogged tubes from Sen. Ted Stevens

So one sees, this is really all well co-ordinated and thought through.

IMO no one can invent such things - they MUST be real.

The European Commiission published the draft of the new Roaming Regulation to bring down the high roaming charges within Europe. All regulators and mobile operators started already calculating.

What will the regulation mean for consumers?

• Prices paid for international roaming when travelling within the European Union will not be unjustifiably higher than the charges for calls paid within the user’s country.

• Consumers will benefit from lower prices for making calls in the visited country, back home or to any other EU Member State.

• Consumers will make considerable savings when receiving calls.

• Prices operators charge each other (wholesale charges) will be considerably lower than what they are today. This ensures all operators will be in a position to offer lower retail tariffs.

• Transparency of roaming charges for consumers will be enhanced. Mobile operators will be required to provide customers with full information on applicable roaming charges when subscriptions are taken out and to update consumers regularly about these charges. Consumers can ask for information on roaming charges free of charge either via SMS or voice call.

• National regulators will also be tasked to monitor closely the development of roaming charges for SMS and multi-media message services (MMS).

The U.S. House passed an Internet bill yesterday that would prevent gamblers from using credit cards to bet online. It voted 317:98 for the bill which would allow authorities to work with Internet providers to block access to gambling websites, although some say:

"Prohibition didn't work for alcohol. It won't work for gambling."

others say: "Regulating a $12-billion industry would be better than outlawing it".

On the other hand, the Internet gambling industry is already entirely off-shore though about half of the customers live in the U.S.

Of course there are extemptions: Horse Racing and State Lotteries - How did the old Romans say: "Pecunia non olet"

I basically do not gamble, because you cannot win in the long run - some 35 years ago I studied some mathematics - but what I know is that casinos are a place where you loose about 1% to 10% per play - depending what and how you play.

In state lotteries it is 50%

Is it to block competion - or is the U.S. simply going down the path to forbid everything somebody has fun with:

Starting with smoking and gambling, alcohol will be next, sex, eating fast food (this will be a hard one), laughing, ...

What is left in god's own country: working, eating vegetables and wage war against Irak (or Iran or whatever is suitable.

Every major city already announced to provide "free" WiFi hotspots, some of them also cheap FTTH for every household. London, San Francisco, Chicago, I also remember Philadelphia, Vienna and now also Paris. They are announced by (mostly socialist goverened) cities with the intention to bring the city on top of the IT-rankings in the world, but then nothing happens.

In reality you may either find open WiFi networks by private people (the so-called linksys, dlink, belkin, etc. networks), or (in Europe) the very expensive hotspots (nobody is using) from mobile operators, such as T-Mobile and Swisscom. Or the even more expensive (if roaming) 3G UMTS networks.

The Time is not right for ENUM - says the Telecommunications Carrier Forum (TCF). Not even for a trial.

The Telecommunications Carriers Forum has shot down InternetNZ's plans for a trial of Enum, a phone and Internet addressing system that could help bring low-cost Internet telephone calls into the mainstream.

The argument is very interesting:

A report by the industry body, which represents companies such as Vodafone, Telecom and TelstraClear, says Enum should be delayed till number portability is in place in April next year.

TCF chairman Malcolm Alexander says issues such as privacy and security need to be ironed out before a public trial begins. He also says building the Enum system would bleed personnel away from the TCF's number portability project, which is more important.

"Our priority is the delivery of number portability as per the deadline set by the telecommunications commissioner. The same people, the same engineers would have to do both."

Now the really funny issue here is that (Infrastructure) ENUM is the ideal solution for number portability. But instead of taking the opportunity that NZ is very late in adopting number portability and could choose therefore a real forward looking solution, implementing number portability both for VoIP and PSTN using Infrastructure ENUM. Especially in the US, but also in Europe, the hot issue of the year is IP Interconnect and number portability for VoIP.

No, they first implement number portability in the old-fashioned way first on the PSTN, and when they are finished, they eventually may look around what to do with VoIP. Ah, and not to forget: the security and privacy concerns have to be ironed out.

OTOH, it is nice to hear that the Carriers down under still have one or two engineers left in their company doing this.