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The ENUM Working Group session commenced on the 18th of November, 2010, at 2 p.m.:
NIALL O'REILLY: Ladies and gentlemen, you are very welcome to the session of the ENUM Working Group of RIPE 61. If you didn't mean to be in ENUM but want to be in Anti?Abuse, that is upstairs. I am Niall O'Reilly, one of the co?chairs of this Working Group. Carsten Schiefner is the other one. I may not be speaking as I would like to, my voice is hoarse. Please don't hesitate to ask me if it's not clear. We have a scribe and jab monitor provided by RIPE NCC, that is Emile and Alex. Thank you very much for being here. We appreciate this support. If you want to comment or intervene in the meeting, please remember to state your name when you approach the microphone. And we have a draft agenda here, I think you can see it on the screen, as well as the one in front of me.
Are there any suggestions or changes to the agenda? Is anybody awake? Fine. OK.
So there are really no suggestions for changes to the agenda. So we will move immediately on to item B, we put out a call for objections to the minutes of the last meeting at RIPE 60, which expired at the beginning of the week, and we had one request for clarification and Carsten and I and Peter Koch have to work on that and make the clarification happen so I don't declare those minutes final just now. It's an action item on Carsten and me to deal with that. We don't have an action list so we don't have to deal with agenda item C. And just to make the flow easier ?? no, I won't yield to that temptation at the moment. That means we are ready at stage D, and I'd like to invite Rodrigue Ullens to give his presentation on the share international network plus AA 85100 ?? no, I am wrong, that is 53 for Central Amsterdam. That is of no relevance here, I suppose. Rodrigue, the floor is yours.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: Thank you. Well, I will try not to make you fall asleep. I will try very hard. So, I will quickly go through the agenda of this presentation, and maybe we will tweak it based on questions or remarks. Basically, I want to start with a couple of introductions on VoIP and numbering in general. To explain where we come from and where we are going. Then, I will explain where we tweak concept comes from, the history behind it, where we are now, and then in further detail what we have been doing with ENUM more specifically. I just want to start by saying that I am clearly not an ENUM expert, so I think the people in the audience here are far more expert than I am. I think my company's expert in numbering, so that is the perspective we will bring here to the group and then make we can discuss with the ENUM more specifically.
So, if I start by just looking at the Voiceover IP and numbering that has has happened, I think there has been a lot of new players that joined the telecoms play field, because of low cost of entry, because of machines like at risk where you can start a VoIP company very quickly, because when you do VoIP, you have customers all over the world, sour not focused on one country any more. You can have, from day one, customers in every possible country that has Internet accessible and because all this clash and mix between computers and telecoms, I said when you look at voice 2.0 and clawed computing and communication, it's all mixing telecoms or communication with the power of computing and software.
So initially Voiceover IP was focused on providing cheap calls, that is clearly not the case any more. Right now it's more focused on bringing additional service. That is I think where ENUM can bring some perspective because it allows to potentially help on new services.
So, these are more items on what has happened recently or in the past couple of years, more specifically to numbering. It's, first of all, that we have seen with the Internet that there are no geographical boundaries any more. Initially, the E164 numbering space was very well?defined, there are country codes, area codes; this is less and less relevant now, it's in fact not relevant ?? completely not relevant any more. The second aspect that has changed a lot in the past couple of years is the fact that a lot of people have a number ?? a phone number from one country but they travel or they move to other countries, so they want to keep their phone number when they travel and go away. People don't want to be bound any more by one identifier that can only be used when they are in country, they want to be able to have one identifier and use it all over the world. Suballocations, initially, when numbers were created a service provider was created a block of phone numbers from a regulator and was supposed to assign these to individual users. What we see in practice now because the barrier of entry has lowered to become a service provider, is you have a lot out there that do not want to be licensed or registered with the regulators and just obtain phone numbers from other service providers, so you have a change of allocation of phone numbers from one provider to the other. And the last aspect of, would would say, disruption in the way telecommunication works today, is a fact that incoming calls and out ?? and outgoing calls can be completely separated, initially when you were buying phone service you were buying an access line from a telecom operator and it was giving you incoming and outgoing calls and your phone numbers. This is not true any more. One example is Skype, you can have Skype in and out, totally separate services and allows for new kinds of innovation as well.
So if you look at all these technical innovations and the way the regulation is today, what is clearly defined in the regulation, there are a lot of grey areas, a lot of areas where the regulators are behind technology.
So, more specifically on the regulations, well, in countries like in Europe and so on, the regulators have come up with new regulations targeted at electronic communication, so VoIP and so on, and some countries like the Netherlands, for example, are starting to be inknow have ative in their regulation. They clearly define or they clearly separate incoming calls from outgoing calls in the statistics and so on, so we are getting there. And little by little we can see all kinds of regulations that are starting to apply to VoIP such as the obligation to provide emergency calls and lawful intercept, directly services and so on.
More specifically around numberings, what we have seen now is, OK, again in Europe, for example, you have the obligation or all countries are having the obligation to implement centralised number portability databases. That is also potentially interesting for ENUM because in these countries in a lot of cases you combine a central number portability database with an ENUM database. Sub allocation becomes something that becomes allowed. It was not allowed in a lot of countries in the past, but more allowed now. In a lot of countries you can start to see the potential for nomadic queues, so to have a phone number and keep using it in a lot of other countries, again in Europe the European Commission has come up with one regulation where you can have a phone number from a country and use it anywhere you want. So you see things evolving. You also see a lot of countries coming up with specific numbering arrangements for Voiceover IP for example. I will go through some examples. If you look at Europe, Asia, just show some examples of countries that have created specific numbering arrangements for VoIP, Austria, France, Germany and so on, just a couple, sing pore, Japan and so on. You also have some countries that have created specific number ranges for ENUM, I think that is one of the most progressive if you look at Austria, I think it's one of the isolated cases.
If you look at providing VoIP services and you want to do it with geographical numbers, why do that? Because VoIP numbers are still not very much well?known by users; they are sometimes not eachable from all carriers and sometimes more expensive, so if you can use geographical numbers for VoIP services it's interesting, but it's not possible everywhere. If you look at USA, Canada and so on, they don't make a difference between VoIP or non?VoIP services; it's all the same, so there is one type of the number, it's the same number for mobile calls, there is just one type of number for mobile he geographical and so on. There are countries do not allow you to use geographical numbers such as Malaysia, Korea, that might change. But some countries are still restrictive in the use of geographical numbers for VoIP. And then you have countries that allow you to use both so that have made a difference between geographical numbers and VoIP numbers but that still allow you to use geographical numbers for VoIP, such as France, Netherlands, Germany and so on, but if you do use that for VoIP, it comes with restrictions.
Are you still there? I try to make a landscape of where we are with numbers, Voiceover IP and so on today, as a background I will continue now with spending the next step where he are coming from on the 883 concept. If there are questions? Don't hesitate.
So, OK, our company is focused on providing for to telecom providers and we said OK with the changing world, people that are all your relationship are not made by proximity, you don't have been relationship with people that are in your country any more but your relationship are based to affinity so you can have a relationship with people all over the world, people are not living in just one country any more, they travel and more so if you look at the Internet concept we thought OK it would be nice to have also phone numbers that are mapped to the concept of the Internet where nothing is based on a certain geographical location. We went to the ITU and we looked at what sort of possible numbers we could apply for in order to provide such services, and there were two types of area codes or country codes that were already created, global country codes, 881 and 882, and we looked at each of them. 881 is for satellite providers, and then you have 882 which is used for private company networks. It's assigned to some carriers but I don't think it's very much used. But we had two problems with these country codes: The first one is that you could not sub allocation was not allowed, meaning that Voxbone as a carrier was assigned a block of, let's say, 100 million numbers, we could not further sub assign part of that number range to other service providers. With these two country codes it's illegal. The second problem we had is that these two number ranges or country codes were only for services that were fully managed by one company. So it could not be used on unmanaged network, which is typically the Internet. It's not managed end?to?end by just one company. So we said to the ITU well we want another service, can we create a new country code, so the discussion started, it took a while and in June 2007, the concept was approved and the it was signed plus 883, created plus 883 country code and removed these two, basically it treats 882 and 881 but without the two restrictions that I mentioned initially and Voxbone then got assigned plus 8835100 for the service. We call this service iNUM, not to be confused with ENUM. INum with a little "i," stands for international number. And that is how we call the service. And we started launch in 2008 and little by little more and more companies are joining the concept of.
So, what is it? Well, the goal is to have international phone number so not linked to any country or geography, starting with country code 883. The goal is to have a unique identifier, mainly for VoIP application for new kinds of services and the goal is to have free reachability for these phone numbers inside a community of participating carriers that would route calls to these phone numbers for free, to create a big community of users that would call each other or send messages or video calls to each other for free, but then of course there is people outside of that community and there, there would be fees to join the iNUM or to reach the iNUM community.
In total we got allocated 100 million numbers. From that block, approximately 20 millions are assigned to various service providers. It doesn't mean that number are used. They are assigned. I don't know the exact portion that is effectively used today. There is a couple more, a few more than 100 service providers participating in the trials. We also tried to involve universities and NGOs to try out new concepts, Skype and Google talk and there is reachability from major like BT, Horizon, etc.
So you can ask me why, especially in a conference like this one, RIPE and so on, that is focused on IP and why do we even care any more about phone numbers, why do we still work so much on phone numbers, what is the purpose? Well, the last few years that we have been in this business, we can see that first of all, a lot of carriers, a lot of users are still very much used to phone numbers and it's not going to change for a very long time. It's not before a lot of one or two more generations that there will be alternatives. Phone numbers is today still the only solution to bridge the PS T N with VoIP.
If you look at Skype, Skype in and out, the two profitability services of Skype, they both use phone numbers to communicate with the PSTN, that is the whole essence of it. So basically, numbers are the only way to have forward looking application but that still works with the past, the traditional, everything has been done so far.
And if you look at single successful VoIP service they use phone numbers in one way or another. I will just make an example, or to make the case: Google talk, is it success? I am not sure. When you look at Google voice, what is the difference? Google voice is the fact that you use phone numbers to, as the identifier and not just a Google talk, e?mail and so on address, and I think between the two you can see how much more successful is Google voice, just because it speaks to everybody, everybody has a phone number and everybody would like to use these phone numbers more efficiently and you can see the same, Skype again the same, the only successful service Skype in and out, I am saying paid services. But that is the same with every successful VoIP services that makes some money, it uses phone numbers in one way or the other. Finally, we think that phone numbers is a very old concept but you can do a lot more with them of that, what people are doing today. Today, people don't really use phone numbers to make video calls. Why not? It's just an identifier. OK, it's ?? initially a phone number was completely linked to the PTSN and because of that you have some restrictions but as you start looking at phone numbers, just an identifier for a communication and when you start linking it to the IP world and not to the PTSN world any more we can do everything with phone number as you can with e?mail address, so why not?
Actually, that is our belief, in any case.
So, maybe more specifically, to the point with this group, the ENUM part, so what is the ?? how did it all start? Well, in March 2009 we contacted the RIPE with the standards request for delegation of 8835100. What is a little bit specific here in this application is that we don't actually own the country code so we cannot be considered the same as a regulator that acts on behalf of a country and that owns, if I can say, or that company manages a country code. We had 883 and actually just a part of 883 so we had to go to a special interim procedure which took sometime, and there was, yes, an exception required in order to allocate 883, 5100 even though it's not a fully owned country code. In July 2010 the delegation was completed and the reason why it took so long was not because of RIPE, it was because we had to install additional DNS servers that had to be ready before we could get the delegation completed, and in September 2010 so two months ago we started the trial with the people that are involved with iNUM, with 883.
So, what are we currently doing in this trial: Well, the initial goal was to ?? our initial concept of 883, it's a private peering between service providers, basically. We said why not try and open it up to the public to allow any kinds of reachability to 8838 to people that are connected to the Internet. That was initial goal, which we did. But OK, we are still a Telco from origins and so we are kind of afraid of what happens if we start opening it up to the public, maybe going to create a lot of spam and so on so we started with a very strong anti?spam filter, people here believe it's a good idea but that was our belief in the beginning and we opened it up only for service providers so the only ones that can actually participate are service providers, not really end users. In terms of reachability, I mean. As an end user you can reach plus 883 with ENUM of course but you cannot really apartment and have an 883 assigned phone number as an end user directly.
We have a worldwide Backbone we use and also for this ENUM routing. On the architecture itself, this is the architecture we had in place, so before we started the ENUM trial, so basically it's an architecture mainly designed to forward signalling. I think there is a pointer. So, basically, if a service provider connected over Internet to the whole 883 or that is like a virtual country if you want to accept, geographically located, it's a country that spans the world, if a call comes in from one of the partners it will be routed over the Internet to our architecture, to the ISP signalling servers. There can be media forwarding if needed for transcoding and so on but by default it's not and it's reforwarded to another partner, so it's just kind of peering platform between partners. The calls can also come in from traditional TTM networks, in which case it comes through some of our gateways and from there we forward on Internet.
So for a the ENUM trial, more specifically we added some elements, DNS servers to answer the queries and some additional public SIP proxies because the ISP proxies that you have here are not public, there is some security in there. So that is what ?? that is the additional infrastructure that we added.
And how does it work? Well, basically, like a standard query; already maybe some differences from some of the implementation you have done, but basically, a DNS query comes in to our DNS servers, we return a CPR I, what is different with some of the others whatever number you query, you will always return the same URI so we want at this point people to go through all our phone numbers and see which numbers are allocated or not so we always return the same CPR I and the CPR I or it's in fact the IP address of the public SIP proxies. And the goes of these is to have a front end because initially it was a private network, now we add public reachability so they are there to provide some security and anti?spam and so on in front of the rest of the network.
So our anti?spam, what have you done? Like I said we wanted to make it very strong, the way it works when ENUM calls come into the architecture, there is IV R that asks for authentication, it allows you make 100 calls, if you wanton make again 100 more calls you have to make another identification so it's kind of annoying but we will see and we might remove that if we see that people behave correctly and if we find better solution but initially we wanted to make it strong. There is a black list where our iNUM can ?? configure any networks cannot join them, everything edited through web port tunnel.
Just some statistics on ?? again it's a trial, so you can see that it's not very active at this time. We have between 10 and 30 queries per day so it's still very, very early stage, I would say. We will see how that goes.
What are we seeing as potential issues or potential reasons this would not take off:
Well, first of all, we don't see a demand or need from end users so it's like you have to create a demand or need for service. There are no killer service from ?? again, our company does not intend to create services, we are there to help others to create services but we have not yet seen a service that would say nice, that is really the service I need. And then some of our partners are asking us to give them a full sub delegation so like you can have, like you would have with standard ENUM delegation, the issues we have today with that is we would lose control completely on the way numbers are then being used and as a Telco, and that I think one of the issues with ENUM in general, as a Telco you want to have interconnect revenues for the calls that are coming to your network. If you allow anyone to use phone numbers without going through your network any more you lose that revenue. That might become smaller problem in the if you tour because it's termination rates are going down every year, so at some point the termination rates will be so low that Telcos won't care so much any more but today that is still a big issue.
On the other hand, some of the benefits we see in one of the reasons why we did participate in this trial is because we see it as just another routing mechanism that is more flexible for people to reach 883 phone numbers. We want to see it as a playground where service providers can try out new services, where they can innovate their own phone numbers, again to make phone numbers more interesting, I think that is very valuable, and also to innovate around business models. If Telcos are going to lose their revenue from interconnect streams, they need to find ways to make money elsewhere, so having a concept or a platform like here where you don't count on interconnect revenues any more, allows you to innovate and try and find new ideas for business models.
Yes. That is it for me. But I would be very interested to hear because again, I think people here are clearly more expert in ENUM. From what you have seen here, if you have ideas or you see as interesting or where you have questions or items where you say you should do this or that or we want to participate or whatever, I would really like to have some input on whatever you think.
NIALL O'REILLY: It's great to see such a queue at the microphone.
RICHARD: Regarding number of reachability database doesn't define how a should be done in the country so there is still possible ways to do it and other ways. I don't say it's better to do in different way, I mean we do run in Lithuania and centralised model and on the second point is that you are still using, as far as I understand, WellCard, UR in all of your delegated space, and you are always writing to your proxies so you actually, your middleman, you have your own proxy, you can maybe disallow some services, so you are like inter media which filters out what can be done.
SPEAKER: Is that good?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Yes with SIP for example.
SPEAKER: You say it's not?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: It's not.
SPEAKER: Because?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Because your SIP process can restrict the way it can be used for example. Other things that ?? you have this anti?spam contra measures which inject some traffic as I understand now. You maybe have some back?to?back so it can probe SIP in many ways so I think it's quite complicated and not really the best way to do it.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: You are saying you are from a regulator, right?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: No, we are independent company.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: But your belief is that people should find a way towards completely delegate the ENUM numbers or delegation to the end users? And if so, what is the business model for the Telco?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I don't know.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: Then you would charge per number maybe like a web domain, something like that.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: It's just a register business I believe. If you want to add some ?? maybe you should allow subscribers to add these to your services in their zones. That is it.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: OK. Thank you.
NIALL O'REILLY: That is perhaps one direction of innovation of business model that you suggested.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Essentially, first question was pretty much the same, like where comes this notion from that there is a requirement for central number portability database, because I haven't heard so, so far, really, that there is ?? that is EC or whatever requirement for centralised ??
RODRIGUE ULLENS: Not for centralised, for portability ?? sorry.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Then the next question is, how did you manage to get 8835100 into the global peers den routing space because what I hear from Austrian colleagues it was super difficult to get the 720 and 780 numbers base being routed all over the place, say as in even if it's like pushed to tremendously to third parties, they simply do not do it because you have to put it in the switch manual.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: It's not complete. We are far from complete. It's just, it's an ongoing process that will take years and years and years. Indeed, I mean, I think the last country even I can tin stein, I don't know how many years it took them to have it routed so we don't expect it to be ready, we try to push on one hands on the demands to create services for users, as their operator to open up, and that is why we started ?? that is why we wanted to have a number range where sub allocation was possible because we felt that as one company, we will never be able to push all over the world for end users to call their operator and to open, so we tried to have people involved or companies involved over ?? all over the world and they help us in pushing the opening of 883 through ??
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Local or regional peer pressure.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: Yes.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: That basically answers my next question already, Voxbone seems to be a re?seller's company as in you don't have been any direct customers, you provide that service exclusively to other who have direct customers.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: Yes.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: The interim procedures for the allocation of 883, have they only been ?? I mean the procedures for the even delegation, have they only been made up when you requested it or have they been thought up before that already as in when the number space has been created? Because the ?? yes, it was more or less clear that sooner or later there will be a need for sub allocation and so there will be a need for ENUM delegation.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: It was already before. It was already, like, before.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: The last question is, if you have the ?? if you have the ?? other way around ?? in your ENUM try if it's always the same SIP proxy, how would be ?? how would be ?? how would be the core party identified, say ?? if you always have the same entry for any and each number and/or same SIP address, within the 883 network, how would be the core party be identified?
RODRIGUE ULLENS: It's a good question. Actually, I don't know. I have to check that internally, I don't know. That is a good question. Maybe there is some memory that is kept into our ?? between our systems. I will check that because I am not sure.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: From nix.it. I have several questions and comments. First is a comment, I think Google voice is popular because it offers you free calls into the PSD ?? I think Google voice is that popular because it gives you free call into the PSDN, of course it uses phone numbers instead of URI, I think the popularity is because of the free call not because of the phone numbers.
About the reachability, it was already asked by Carsten. I wonder, so is the phone numbers which are registered by your customers, do you really put them into the public ENUM tree? Are they really in E164.arpa? Can they be queried by everybody in the world?
RODRIGUE ULLENS: Today, the whole range is publically for everybody, yes.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: So, because I always wondered, it's a bit different, strange for me that on one hand you have like it's only ?? it's a closed trial and only for your customers; and you have ENUM, you have the delegations in the EU but always want to the controller so if the date in ENUM is always the same, actually, there is no information inside of the ENUM, so the customers can just forward the calls almost directly to your session by the controller because in the ends from the ENUM tree the response at my session so it can send it there directly and you can do the route ?? you already do the routing internally to the other customers so there is actually no benefit in putting the information directly into the ENUM so it's ?? maybe for carriers, maybe the old style telcos want that, in Austria and other countries everywhere public table and there was no need for ?? Telcos don't use it, afraid of being openly connected and they want to have some kind of closed group and they want to ?? maybe you are more successful than we but it looks a bit strange to me.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: So indeed it, you could send a call directly to the SIP proxy and it would not make a difference. The difference there is is that like you say, we add another way of making a query or to know how to reach the agent by making an ENUM query, while this was not possible before, before you had to send a CPRI directly to ?? no, sorry, first of all, when I say it's closed, I mean that only providers can actually get a delegation or a sub allocation of the phone numbers. That is what I mean when it's closed. People from anywhere in the world, end users can actually, as of the moment we started the trial, people from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection can send a call by making an ENUM query and each our numbers. That was not the case before, before it was completely closed for making phone calls and to get an allocation. Now the allocation is still private but reaching the phone numbers is public. That is the change. And indeed, it's maybe a little bit in a situation in between two, but we don't ?? yeah, it's a Telco kind of attitude but we want to do it little by little and not open everything from the kind.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Earlier on, if really your customers interested in getting this 883 numbers, because at least in Austria, everybody wants a geographic phone number, so we only ?? the VoIP service providers only allowed to give the customer 720 or 780 phone numbers and from some that works out really expensive to call so nobody wants them; everybody is afraid in Austria if you give 720 or 780 they are afraid of calling it because they don't know how it's getting charged and I wonder if it's like international phone number plus 883, so even I would be some kind of alarm, so I don't want to call this number but I don't know how much it would cost me.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: Completely right. I mean, the goal is not to ?? to create a new number that and people will forget about their current number and just replace that; we don't expect everybody in the world to replace their phone number with an 883 number that will take over every phone number. No, it's more a way to, we use it as a new way to try and innovate some new services first of all, together with the partners. It creates a reachability that is for free among all the participants. Of course outside of that group, there is a fee that sometimes can be very expensive, so it's completely the same as 720 numbers. It's more like, we see it as more R and D kind of concept where people can participate and innovate but belongs in the VoIP that contact each other not from the PSTN.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Termination fees between carriers getting lower and lower and maybe sometimes it will get removed at all, I don't think it will get removed, if there is no more termination fees in between the carriers, at least in Austria everybody ask the carrier why you charge me at all because it doesn't cost you to terminate the call to another carrier. I think they are happy to have the termination costs even higher. If the traffic is identical in and outgoing, so it's like the total cost is zero but if they have high termination fees they can argue to the customs, we have so high we have to charge a lot for the calls.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: I am not not saying it's going to zero, I mean at least that it's going to go so low that it might become relevant, and irrelevant in some cases and it does go down, it went down a lot on the fixed network, it still goes down in a lot of countries, again Italy in the summer it went down so you see it in a lot of countries it still goes down and in UK it is so low that it's ?? I don't think it can go much lower any more, and then on the mobile side, it's also going down, well either by regulation from the European Union or because of other reasons, by local regulators, there is a road map, I don't know just an example of the Belgian regulator, in 200012 the ?? by 2012 the rates will be three times lower so it does go down, for fixed and mobile will follow, to a point where carriers might be more willing than before to exchange traffic without a fee because, IPP ring, it could become peering or change instead of charging per minute you could evolving to charge for capacity like IP. What I mean is that it might go down much more than or it will go down much more than the way it is today and this might influence the way carriers thinks. You already see today mobile operators which are the ones that make the most money from this interconnect revenues, in the past they would never create services that would potentially harm that revenue, OK, but today, if you look at companies like O2 in the UK, from Telefonica, they just launched a service where they allow you to get a phone number from a remote country, forward it on your mobile phone. So this is a concept that I think you will never see before where the termination rates were so high because you have, they might loose on the termination rates. But on the other hand they win in terms of /R*FPT per customer. You will see changes in business models or innovations because the termination rates go so low and they are not so much of a concern any more to the operators.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: In Austria, mobile termination fees go down but recently fix line started increasing.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: That is good.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: It is a big increase because the incumbents said yes, because nobody uses fixed line any more.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: Yes ??
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Last comment about your anti?spam techniques, I think it's quite annoying if you always have to press some ? but if you have the problem, maybe then you will need it but at least what we see in Austria, I never had heard that ?? that any spam issue currently, so current three the real problem is just protects against the SIP proxy to find out user name and password and use this PP X or this service for free termination of calls. This may often cause some companies if they don't have a really have limited upstream bandwidth it might happen this thank this generates so much traffic on the up stream that they are completely off line. So currently it's not spam but /PRO*FP which may cause harm to SIP.
RODRIGUE ULLENS: Is it very much used in Austria?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: No. People are not that interested in VoIP at all because mobile phones are so cheap that there is no need to using VoIP, maybe for international calls but just call your friends, no, it's like like in Germany where it's possible and not in Austria that mobile tariffs are so cheap. From the ENUM is more or less, yes, you have like two registrars which are, they like the idea of this VoIP service provider, they like the idea of open connectivity and publishing the URI ENUM but there is not really a business case for it.
NIALL O'REILLY: I was going to say that is the end of the questions. It's OK for you to delay your own presentation.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: One thing I noticed, you will allocating some numbering space in other European countries. Is it something related to Skype out and to remove some costs involved for outgoing calls?
RODRIGUE ULLENS: Remove some?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Costs related to outgoing calls from your 883 code?
RODRIGUE ULLENS: No, no.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: You have to get a contractual relationship with us, we will talk about it later.
NIALL O'REILLY: Fine. Whether there are any more questions, I think we have to close the mics there and thank you.
(Applause)
The next speaker is Ricardas Pocius to tell us what they are doing in Lithuania.
RICARDAS POCIUS: Hello, I'm CTO of a company called /TPHAOUPL RIS, which stands for my number. We are like a Telco secretarier orientated company. We provide some code for regulators and Telcos. We run ENUM registry and previous slide I forgot to say what is the presentation. So it's ENUM in Lithuania and/or how we started ENUM registry.
So bits of history: At least what I am aware of. During 2006 I was VoIP deployments in schools and I came up and saw such a great thing as ENUM and I was really interested but I saw that there is no delegation for Lithuania so I inquired of the regulator about possibilities to have this delegation. I wasn't ?? well, I was surprised that regulator was so no interested in it so they supported us a lot and later this year I attended RIPE 53, I had a chance to talk with Niall, Carsten, also ?? which inspired me a lot, thank you. So, I came back and I relayed what I have gathered here, it was enough to convince regulator to get up ?? so they convinced, well, they actually went to ministry for telecommunications and transportation and convinced them to conduct public trials, and only after maybe eight months we got our delegation. It was delegated to regulator and not to us. And we started a public trial so our company approached regulator and offered to supply software for registry, we also supplied Internet bandwidth and human resources to help to conduct a trial. The trial was announced in ICT trade show in Fobalt, it wasn't really a surprise for anyone, I mean we only received 600 user registrations and we had an option in the registry which allowed users to opt out, that means that nobody else could register the same name. And well, we were running this public trial system for about two years and public consultation on the rules of how ENUM should operate in Lithuania were started and nobody participated. I mean, I was waiting for some aggression from Telcos or nothing else and it wasn't happening at all. So I only committed one draft of the regulations which I was thinking of, and that is why now I feel a lot of pressure because I am not sure done well enough. After public consultation is finished, regulator made some conclusions and created rules, how ENUM should be operated in Lithuania. Later that year, the concession was started to operate tier 1 registry. We won their concession and the history was quite brutal. I mean, there was free participants, one was a ban to participate longer because it was related to local telecom and the company must be ?? it should be independent. The other contestant was ccTLD operator, but they didn't match requirements for something so we just ?? we left it alone and we wanted this contract and signed contract with regulator, and next day was my birthday, so I had no chance to celebrate. It took us a month to run the required infrastructure to run the registry, we were not really prepared for it ?? we are prepared because we had some operating experience and after one year later, we were delegated our zone directly to us, that means we also administered it and technical contact for this delegation.
So at this point, any register could apply to supply services for end users. A little bit about environment:
We have population of three?and?a?half million. The minister of transportation and communications is ITU contact member, so they decide is it allowed or not allowed to run and who should run it. The communication regulatory authority manages numbering plan and rules, who should own the numbers. We have 8 digit closed numbering plan. We have allocation ?? I have some statistics about allocations in Lithuania. We have 1.1 million of fixed lines and 64 percent of them in use, and we have seven?and?a?half million and 63 percent of them are in active use, we have about 140 percent administration rate of mobile services. It's quite high.
About, with the rules on how numbering resource management is done. So any ?? almost any company can register as a service provider, by just notifying regulator, this means and after you do it you can just offer services for anyone. Only fixed service providers are able to get geographical numbers and only mobile service providers are able to get use to ?? well right to use mobile numbers. Any company can apply for service numbers, and there is some type called personal numbers, they are and any person can apply for these numbers directly from regulator. It costs now 30 euros per trance application and about one euro per month because of all paperwork needed to be done. And all allocation has single number, that means we have really finalications. You are not required to allocate huge blocks, I mean you can just request one number if you need it. The number in operation in Lithuania for mobile geographical and mobile numbers which are service providers only.
So now on the rules on the operations of ENUM databases in Lithuania. We have two tier model which tier one registry and registrars, multiple registrars, and we have DNSSEC in place, and we must have DNSSEC in place because it's a requirement from regulator. It's seen as an enabler for maybe additional possibilities to use ENUM, for example, draft for DNS, it's IK?DNS, is that right? Like for key distribution. OK, so we also, the registry is allowed to act as a registrar, that means if nobody comes to market and take the registered place we can retrospect one. We can obligation to remove if we receive any information these numbers were unallocated or unregistered by regulator. And registers that are responsible for authentification of the users. That means there is no implicit mechanism defined in the rules, it means it's up to registers to define the way to do it. Users of course need to supply the data, sorry only user supply data can be populated in public tree and these users should notify registers if they remove from right to use number, for example, because they broke the contract and they lose any of this right.
So, how the registry looks like now. It's one flat zone with delegation toss tier two providers name servers. We have one delegation per number. That is a different way to do it because some countries, for example Austria, they have these block delegations and we think that it may be get complicated when some of the numbers from the block may go to different service providers or person. So we just use this different way and we use one delegation per number. Zone is signed, we have our keys uploaded to peering zone. We still don't use NSEC3, we monitor activity of zone working, we recorded some, it was interesting, we have some test data and booby trap data. We don't operate WHOIS database. Registers are obligated to store the data about the subscribers. We run two fronted DNS servers with hidden master. Separate box for zone signing and redoesn't boxes for registry, for interfaces and utilities.
We have two options for accession our registry, it's web interface for those who don't want to operate some automated solution and we have SO AP based interface which is used to deliver messages and we don't have EPP. I know that this community usually uses EPP and we don't because we think it would be too chat in our scenario because we have so many small allocations and it would be maybe difficult to run. So we use user/password and certificate authentication when we establish sessions to interfaces. And we use asynchronism messaging as a way to inform register about requirements for operations. So we have basic operations, register and unregister, setNS and setDS. These can be applied on multiple numbers, one simple operation can make effect on hundreds of thousands of numbers.
The sad part:
We still don't have a commercial registrar. We run registered system which was used in trials, we adapted it to include the registrar interface, so it still works, it's open for everyone, it's free to use. We still have a short messages based authentication and manual subscriber for geographical numbers so people need to come and provide some document.
We don't have support of DNSSEC in trial system. 700 users are registered in a trial system. 300 opted out. 100 users have some NAPTR records in the zones. And we have 20 people who actually use their own name servers to serve their records.
We should now start ?? we don't have any killer application and everything or we can focus on what can be done. So, we conducted some trials because we are a number of ?? we have all information of allocated important numbers and we used branch of public tree where we put all this data which number corresponds to what service provider. I don't disclose now what ?? what branch we use, still, because we see dat ? maybe it will change in the future, I know question that maybe we should use ENUM for original purpose, it was designed for and that means bridge PS T N or VoIP or Internet services, so what we are looking at is to trying to convince some service provider to commit to calls to ingress points for subscriber zone. So we are looking at SIP, maybe IAX or jingle. We also want to conveyance some service provider to provide messaging Gateway to allow users to receive short messages. Maybe SMPP. We are thinking about user number portability database to steer incoming calls to these numbers, for example, personal numbers, to the service provider which would provide these termination services. And registers to provide all these tools required to glue all the things together, they can provide sub service and everything else. I would like to see ENUM look up included in Lameness framework because it's still not there. Maybe somebody would like to share ??
I see a lack of standardised interface between user and tier?two ratio to populated data and zones so we still have no security in 2007 which could be used. It's quite secure of the way to do it. Of course, requires some shared certificates. So it's a problem. It can be more complicated to deploy. We should target mobile phones, because LTE is coming and soon we will hopefully have data connection with qualitative service in it. It will be easy to authenticate users because there is a subscriber identification model inside, it can be used to to be sure that the number is correct. And user can subscribe to this number. Effort made to include some support for ENUM in a platform, maybe some uniform framework to do it. Should hide some complexity for ENUM users and applications, the framework ?? an application to include some records in it.
What we are planning to do: The telephone, because at this moment no numbers is under rewrite, and it's in the process of development, so we think to introduce some measures to maybe the lower the administrative cost of right to use numbers so we want to use national E card which is E bank identification measures to allow users to authenticate and charge directly from the user bank accounts. The system can be made, capable to act as a registrar. I will finish it. We still have eight minutes left. I mean, in the schedule. So, we went want to introduce mechanism for user to actually steer his number by using database to any service provider he is willing to terminate his calls on. And maybe service providers will be willing to accept it because they still gain some incoming ?? they still use some tariffs for incoming calls that means they still gain some profits for doing this.
And do you have any suggestions or questions?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: From nix.it. I haven't fully understand how do you make the ?? do you make delegations to customers name servers or not just directly in registry or tier 1?
RICARDAS POCIUS: Basically now, we have one registered service, that means well, we run it, so this service allows users to enter any type of records they are willing to or they can request for zone to be delegated to their own name servers. I mean they have the choice. To use our system.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: They can't just enter a NAPTR record or DNS record?
RICARDAS POCIUS: It's a bit of choice, they have a choice, either they use NS records or they populate NAPTRs.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: OK.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I don't understand the concept of the personnel number. Is it a certain number range or is it just that a person allocates, like it's personal number, it's fixed line number or ??
RICARDAS POCIUS: It's know mad I can number. It has some for which defiance the use of number but this prefix is getting extended and a lot of times already, so this space for personal automatic numbers is extended all the time.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: If I would live in Lithuania and I would like to register I would like to have the ENUM domain for my mobile number.
RICARDAS POCIUS: You can ?? I mean, any qualified E 164 number can be actually allocated ?? delegated.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: So, is it a pure user ENUM or is it like carrier ENUMs, who is really allowed to register to the ENUM domain, just to tell the end users me or can also my provider register the ENUM domain.
RICARDAS POCIUS: We don't have crew if you ask this. Actually, you know, we cannot populate any data which doesn't come from the subscriber, I mean subscriber number. That means only user data is in public tree and as I was telling, we had branched in a public tree which below from country code which we used for testing purposes. I mean it doesn't interfere anything in normal operations of ENUM.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: It sounds like what we have in Austria where we have pure user ENUM and we have dedicated tree where we branch which is actually reserved for just carriers to make the registrations, and it's still empty.
RICARDAS POCIUS: We don't offer any interfaces for service providers to populate data there. It was just a test case to maybe find additional applications for ENUM, for example ? course routing, we try to make ?? we made it available for some companies which were interested in it and that is it.
NIALL O'REILLY: Now we have used up the eight minutes of slack at least twice so there is extra pressure on the remaining speakers. So before I call on Anand, let's thank Ricardas, they were very interesting and show although very slowly the thinking of how the ENUM business should expand itself, is actually happening. But slowly. Next up we have Anand Buddhdev. With tier one report from the RIPE NCC.
ANAND BUDDHDEV: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am Anand Buddhdev and I work for the RIPE NCC and I am the manager of the DNS services. I would like to give you a quick update on some of the stuff I have seen at tier 0.
There hasn't been much change in delegations, Voxbone, about which we have heard a few minutes ago, they had approval but had not been delegated but earlier this year in July they got their delegation in the ENUM zone, so that was really the only change. DNSSEC, so five of these ENUM zones as we can see, have been signed, Poland, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Lithuania and Armenia. The Netherlands still don't have a DS record, but I am told it's coming. So, we have been busy with changes to our infrastructure at the RIPE NCC. We have a whole, well we had a single server that serves the ENUM zone along with various other zones of the RIPE NCC, and we have been busy making changes to this infrastructure. We want to deploy multi?server cluster to handle all the DNS queries and this also includes the ENUM zone, and we are also going to deploy a second Anycast site at the London Internet Exchange at the end of this year, so I mean, this is general infrastructure improvement but it also affects ENUM. So, it will be better available.
We have a project at the RIPE NCC where we try and measure lameness in the rivers DNS tree and also include the ENUM zone in these measurements. From the last data point in October 2010, we can see that of the total ?? of the total 48 delegations, we can see 37 are fine; there are eight delegations which are partially lame; and by partially lame I mean that at least one IP address of at least one named server of that zone, it does not respond authorititively; and three are completely lame, meaning none of the IP addresses of all the names servers respond authorititively. This is a little bit better than the last time. We had 17 zones which were partially lame. We do contact the operators now and then to inform them. So some of them have been paying attention and have fixed things. But there is still a way to go.
One of the other stats that I have been producing on a semi?regular basis has been that of undelegated country codes so this is where we capture pcap traces for queries coming for the ENUM zone and I did this capture for a period of ten days. I used it to call DNS cap which allows one to select queries based on regular expressions, so I could filter out the ENUM queries, and then two called DNS stop which allows me to look at the top queriers, top zones queried and names queried, etc., and the particular statistic that I want top present is responses which are of the type NX domain, no such domain and the top few in this include Portugal, the USA, Switzerland, Spain, Russia/Kazikstan, because they shame the same code, a new entry this time around, Denmark, and the codes 00 and 999, and most of these queries or a large chunk of them, actually come from a resolver at FC CN in Portugal. I think we law this the last time as well.
So here is is a graphical representation of this, the large green chunk on the right?hand side is queries annex domain responses for Portugal's country code, below that we have USA and next to that, Switzerland. Switzerland is new in this graph because it was actually withdrawn at some point, but the queries keep coming in. And next to it is Spain and Russia and Denmark, in yellow. The segment on the top left, in grey, I have label it as "others." This is annex domain responses for other country codes, not enough to show separately, and just general garbage, so random text strings dot E164.arpa. Also on this chart I have marked some of the country codes with asterisks these are delegated in the alternative nrenum.net zone, so they are using the alternative. That was it from me. I am happy to take questions
NIALL O'REILLY: Would you like to take half a minute or so to explain a bit more about nrenum or would you prefer me to do that?
ANAND BUDDHDEV: I would prefer to you do that.
NIALL O'REILLY: I will do that in a minute, I will let other people ask you questions first. No mad rush.
ANAND BUDDHDEV: Thank you everyone for listening.
(Applause)
NIALL O'REILLY: A couple of words about NR?ENUM. Some of the national research networks, the Netherlands used to be one of these before the ENUM ?? the E 164 delegation was done for Netherlands and it still appears in the Wikipedia page for NR?ENUM which you can all find by Googling for it. The idea is that countries which are interested in exploring the ENUM technology but for whom ?? for which the E 164 delegation hasn't taken place, can provide an infrastructure for consenting parties to play with the technology. And that is what NR?ENUM. And one of the leading countries involved in this initiative is Portugal, and actually I have a question for you, Anand. It's this ?? you said that most of these queries were coming from Portugal. Is that the case for the queries against other country code?
ANAND BUDDHDEV: No, most of these queries were for the Portugal country code.
NIALL O'REILLY: I see. They are not all coming from Portugal, they are coming from wherever.
ANAND BUDDHDEV: Yes but a large percentage come from this one resolver.
Clause: I wonder how safe it is to query this in our ENUM database, is there some kind of validation for numbers inserted into this tree.
NIALL O'REILLY: Probably you should talk to the people in FFCN who seem to be one of the important players in the NR?ENUM project. This is, as far as I understand, a private club of research ?? national research networks and their customers who have decided to do something. A bit like the Internet was in the late '80s.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I know from some other trees where it's rather easy to get, like, an entry in their ENUM, I think it was like ?? E1 ?? there are so many of this E 164 dot org and I really ?? one day we also had a delegation in one of these trees and we said, hey, we can route toll free numbers to Austria, which points to our asterisk, give you 088 numbers to Austria for free because it doesn't cost awe thing and one day I found out that in another tree there was this entry for 0800 and, another company provided a termination of these free phone numbers to Austria and then I said, OK, but actually I don't want this other company to route my phone calls because they could record every call and they can route it to somewhere else and then I stopped query this alternative ENUM babes. So I ?? now I only query E 164.arpa and nobody else because I don't know how they validate the numbers. I wonder if there is ?? it would be safe to query ??
NIALL O'REILLY: I can give you the email address of somebody who knows more about it than I do.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: That might be an action item ??
NIALL O'REILLY: Fair enough. Are you volunteering, Carsten?
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: OK. That would be the first action item.
NIALL O'REILLY: We can move on to my presentation, please,.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: I have just been pointed out I should speak into the microphone. The idea basically was to, yeah, make that an action item to see whether or not we could get a little bit more about nrenum and it seems to be me for the time being.
NIALL O'REILLY: This time around, this is the usual update of the information that the people running ENUM in the different countries choose to send in to me, and we keep this information on a website which is kindly hosted by Kim Davies who is one ?? who used to be one of the co?chairs of this Working Group before Carsten and I took over and I am keeping this very short this time around. Here are the changes from the last time. There are still ten ENUM ?? ten country codes in production use. There are six extra who have moved into a kind of inactive state after the trial has been done. The six extra ones are all parts of France. You might wonder why France has six country codes. In fact, it has one or two more as well which are in the objected category, but plus 33 as you know is France, and there are country codes for small eye ?? Gian is not an island, it's on the continent, I guess, it's next to Brazil, but all of those, the kind people in France have given me an update on the information, so this doesn't really reflect progress since the last time, but rather, progress and accuracy of the data.
Two countries have let me know that they are not running a trial any more and one of those we have already mentioned, is France. The other is lick tin stein had not quite finished trial which wasn't killed off for few years already and finally they decided enough is enough and they don't want to be delegated any more. The number of delegated domains has gone down by four and up one and down five, actually, because one of those is the plus 8835100 that we heard about from Rodrigue earlier and the total number of delegated zones is still 48. And on the other side of the balance sheet, if you like, we have two or zones not delegated which are Gibraltar which turns out not to have been delegated so that is just an accuracy thing, but we discovered, thanks to Alex le Heux that Gibralter had fallen through the cracks quite a few years ago and they are work issing to get their delegation set up. And the other one is Lichenstein who have decided they don't want to be delegated any more. The other two that are not delegated and have been been through the trial process and come out and decided enough was enough are the North America planet plus one and Switzerland at the number plus 41. I nearly said 44 but that is a different country. That is it you can find this information on the ENUM data dot org web page and once again, I urge everybody please to send me in your updates because there are lots of stuff that ?? lots of stuff that I know isn't right there and I keep asking people for them and it never comes so it never gets corrected but a special thanks to the people who have given me corrections and updates and Alex in the RIPE NCC. Also to Kim Davies who hosts this, he may have moved on to other things interest being one of the co?chairs of this Working Group but he is still letting us use his infrastructure. If there are questions about those numbers by all means ask them. Otherwise, we are at the stage in the agenda where we summarise the action points and ?? before we summarise the action points, is there any other business that anybody would like to do? Denesh, your hand is up.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Here is an independent. I will try not to be too controversial. First, thanks to our he is steamed speakers for a very interesting presentations. A couple of comments from that come to mind through those. One of the comments made by one of the people asking question was people are not interested in ENUM because of cheap mobile phone calls. And the thing is that this does bring to mind what we are trying to do here in ENUM why is it we are trying to promote the ENUM technology when, really, at the end of the day, the end use thor doesn't care about the technology; what they care about is getting a service, the same with v6, why should the end user care about v6 when all they want to do is use the service. And is that something that we, as a group, need to rethink the strategy on ENUM? So, just a question to the group.
The other thing is, what is actually holding ENUM back? And I mention this in the Prague meeting ENUM Working Group meeting in we seem to be talking and talking but we are not actually doing anything. , you know, nothing seems to be done. Seems to be done in isolation, so people are doing great things but done in in isolation, there doesn't seem to be any collaboration or open and honest discussion about what it is that is actually going wrong with ENUM uptake or should we have a joint strategy on the way forward, should we we be collaborating on a concerted solution or a framework of a European way for ENUM to go forward.
So, I think something needs to be done because hopefully my frustration isn't coming out too much here but since 2005/2006 we have been banging on about ENUM but what has happened? Thank you.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Just one observation. I guess if we are discussing ENUM, RIPE is indeed the right framework because, yeah, it's not a services it's a technology but we discuss v6 here and we discuss DNS here, so it's really about technology, it's not so much about services. And Anand on other hand, you are sort of right because I do not understand Internet Service Providers, how they are not able to actually take the technology and build a service out of it. And that is ?? I mean, what I don't really understand, if that would have been the attitude, say, 15 years ago, like yes, we could do a delegation for you but no we are not running named servers and too lazy to do for you, won't have the industry as it is right now. What Internet Service Providers have done in the past and what they are still doing is the customer works on domain ?? the customer needs to come with domain name and the service providers is actually doing the entire rest, and so in that instance I would have hoped that this is the same with ENUM essentially so the user doesn't need to see ENUM he comes with his phone number and gets back load of full of services around that phone number. Yes, and then the question is right, that hasn't happened so far, why is it? And yes. I don't have an answer to that, either, but it's a difficult business, really.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Maybe this is something I suggested was maybe we should have a panel in the Working Group here and get a few registries together to openly discuss here and have questions and come to sort sort of, well, maybe sort of solution or a way forward towards a solution.
NIALL O'REILLY: OK. Here is is a challenge: Do you want to take that action item on and try and work with Carsten and me, lead the initiative to make that panel happen the next time around?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Yes, as long as I have your backing, that's fine.
NIALL O'REILLY: You will, we have to fill the agenda. Any other questions? Comments? Nothing. We have, then, I think, we have nothing for plenary presentations, we have no current interactions with other Working Groups, we have dealt with any other business. So, the summary of the action items is that we have two action items, I think, we thought we were going to have a third one but Anand has sort of anticipated us and done it already, it was already in his presentation, so Denesh is going to lead the initiative to put together a panel discussion for the next session of the Working Group meeting in Amsterdam, and Carsten is going to remind me what your action item is again.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: NR?ENUM
NIALL O'REILLY: We may have have somebody talk talking about that if it's still a live project. So all that remains for me is to thank you all very much for coming along this afternoon, and to give special thanks to the ?? nothing came in on Jabber or instant messages or something? Special thanks to the remote participation and note?taking support from the RIPE NCC and extra special thanks to the speakers ?? I forgot to thank the stenographer, sorry about that.
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