Vendors move to bridge Web and phone network

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A network industry group featuring such heavy hitters as AT&T, Cisco, IBM, WorldCom and AOL Time Warner is urging the U.S. government to support a single, authoritative top-level domain for Enum, an emerging technology that builds a bridge between the public switched telephone network and the Internet.

The industry recommendations are a key milestone in the deployment of Enum, a simple but powerful technology that is generating a great deal of interest in the network industry. Enum lets an end user type a telephone number into a Web browser and access a URL that lists all the available Internet resources for that telephone number, such as an e-mail address or Web address.

The industry group rejected a strategy for Enum favored by dot-com registry VeriSign and start-up NetNumber. Those companies advocate a free-market approach that includes multiple top-level domains for Enum services.

After meeting for six months, the industry group made its recommendations about Enum in a report filed with the U.S. State Department on Friday. The report was not publicly released, but several of the group's participants briefed Network World on its findings.

These participants say 30 companies support the concept of having one global root within the Internet's DNS for resolution of Enum queries. Four companies, including VeriSign and NetNumber, filed a dissenting opinion.

Developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, Enum provides a much-needed way to initiate telephone calls over the Internet. It also offers the promise of giving end users a single point of contact for all their communications devices.

Corporate network managers are eyeing Enum as way of transmitting voice communications over the Internet and thereby slashing their longdistance telephone bills. Enum also offers the promise of enabling unified messaging services for mobile employees.

While the Enum technology is straightforward, the politics of Enum are not. A debate is raging in Washington, D.C., about whether and how the U.S. government should oversee the introduction of Enum services into the Internet. On one side of the debate are telecommunications carriers and equipment providers, which favor a centralized, regulated approach to Enum registrations that is similar to how telephone numbers are handled. The opposing camp asserts that the Enum marketplace should be allowed to develop before government oversight begins.

The industry report to the State Department indicates that the centralized, regulated approach to Enum is gaining ground over the open, competitive marketplace approach. The State Department is the U.S. government liaison to the International Telecommunication Union, which oversees telephone numbering on a global basis.

"This report shows that we are developing some consensus here in the U.S. about our thinking on Enum," says Matt Wald, vice president of IP services at NeuStar. NeuStar is the telephone numbering authority in North America, and it joined the majority opinion on the State Department report. "We hope this report will help provide some incentive for the ITU to also develop some of the same consensus."

VeriSign officials downplayed the industry group's findings, stating that the group did not represent a diversity of Internet stakeholders.

"Most of the participation was from lobbyists for the carriers," says Tony Rutkowski, a vice president at VeriSign. "Only about 10 companies were active participants, and those were mostly [telephone companies] that view the telephone numbers as their [property]."

Others note that the majority opinion was signed by Internet ventures such as Register.com, a domain name registrar, and Nominum, which authored the Berkeley Internet Name Domain software that runs on most DNS servers.

"This is more than just the telephony players," counters Steven Lind, a standards expert with AT&T Labs. "The majority opinion is that the U.S. ought to move ahead with a public infrastructure for Enum."

Lind says the industry group plans to establish a forum to continue the Enum debate.

"There's a lot of work still left to be done," Lind says. "All the Enum interfaces still need to be defined as well as all the requirements for how transactions will happen and how they will be authenticated."

Also at issue is whether the ITU or the IETF's Internet Architecture Board will oversee a global Enum domain and what that domain will be called. The ITU plans to consider these issues in September.

Meanwhile, VeriSign officials say they are moving ahead with plans to offer Enum-like directory services to companies integrating their voice and Internet communications. That's because companies with their own telephone numbering plans can migrate to private Enum services without waiting for the technology to be available in the Internet. However, these companies will only be able to use Enum for internal communications.

How Enum is ultimately regulated has "no impact on corporate network convergence plans," says Lori Whitted, a vice president at VeriSign Global Registry Services. "Companies are looking for the cost savings and efficiencies they can get from running voice over their [IP] networks. They don't have to wait for the Enum debate to be resolved."

Contact Senior Editor Carolyn Duffy Marsan

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