Telcordia Technologies and VeriSign Tuesday will announce the first large-scale test of an emerging technology called Enum that integrates telephone numbers with Internet domain names.
Enum lets an end user type a telephone number into his Web browser and pull up the corresponding e-mail address, URL or IP address.
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Developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, Enum is considered a key enabling technology for the anticipated convergence of the public switched telephone network and the Internet. Enum-based services would allow one telephone number to serve as a single, universal point of contact for numerous communications devices including PCs, fax machines, handheld computers, cellphones and pagers.
"Today we have cluttered business cards with cellphone numbers, e-mail addresses and fax numbers," says Pat Conley, director of business development at VeriSign's Global Registry Services division. "In the future, we could have a single address and let the network resolve that address."
Enum is a simple service that functions like a large database. When an end user types a telephone number into an Enum-enabled application, he pulls up what's called a Naming Authority Pointer record that lists all the resources associated with that number, including the domain name.
VeriSign sees a potential opportunity to serve as the central registry for Enum telephone numbers, Conley says.
"There are 250 million telephones in the U.S. If one percent of those numbers were registered as Enum records, that would be 2.5 million registrations," Conley explains. "We think [Enum] could be a big opportunity around the globe."
Telcordia, meanwhile, is a key architect of the public switched telephone network and wants to develop software to support Enum-based services.
"We'll be using the platforms that we've developed and enhanced over the years, such as the toll-free telephone network, to support the Enum project," says Bryan Mordecai, director of Enum marketing at Telcordia. "The telephone network and the Internet are slowly but surely converging. Enum is a potential catalyst to speed that convergence."
Telcordia and VeriSign are jointly developing an Enum directory and will host an open trial based on the proposed Enum standard. They are inviting software developers and service providers to participate in the Enum trial free of charge. Officials at the two companies are targeting providers of e-mail, instant messaging and voice-over-IP services to participate in the Enum trial.
The Enum trial will begin in December and last for six months. The trial will operate in the DNS infrastructure maintained by VeriSign - formerly Network Solutions - which handles more than one billion domain name system queries per day.
Telcordia and VeriSign will provide participants with a software development kit that includes a library of terms and sample code for Enum.
For more information on the trial, visit www.enumworld.com.
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