REGULATORY DEBATE AND FINANCES SLOW E-NUMBERING TESTS IN EUROPE

Trials for e-numbering (ENUM) services in Germany, U.K. and Austria unveiled their start-up concepts last week at workshops in Berlin, London and Vienna. With regulatory discussions and financial problems of telecom and Internet industries hampering quick rollout of new phone number domains, most of planned trials are behind schedule. “This could be a wakeup call,” said representative of Deutsche Telekom AG about a Tues. ENUM expert roundtable organized by telecom industry association BITKOM in Berlin. “We still have a long, long way to go to a full-grown ENUM market,” said Sabine Dolderer, board member of DENIC, registry for German country-code top-level domain TLD) .de, which houses new German ENUM-trial database.

Hardware and software providers have been invited to participate in DENIC trial and register geographical telephone numbers, mobile numbers and 800 numbers under .9.4e164.arpa TLD. Telephone domains are intended to enable convergence of telecom and Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Customers of ENUM services will get access to wide range of possible services, from simple international look-up services to communication profiles or identity management, experts of European trials said.

Year ago, DENIC applied to International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for provisional delegation of German 9.4.e164.arpa TLD. But early move lost momentum because of dispute between German Regulatory Authority for Post & Telecommunication (RegTP) and Ministry of Commerce and Technology. While RegTP contended it had to watch for competition and privacy problems from beginning, Ministry decided to go for DENIC.

“We certainly don’t want to kill ENUM by overregulation” said representative of Ministry after meeting in Berlin. For example, strict German privacy regulation makes reverse look- ups, core function of ENUM, per se illegal. As for ENUM competition, both RegTP and Ministry now say trial won’t in any way prejudice final ENUM market.

U.K. ENUM Group (UKEG) favors cooperation between possible Tier One registry providers even just for duration of their trial. UKEG earlier this week invited potential trial members for 4.4e164.arpa to ENUM seminar at British Dept. of Trade & Industry (DTI). UKEG members NeuStar (.biz and .us registry), Nominet and Centralnic all are candidates for central database. Under UKEG proposal, they will cooperate for trial to allow “different solutions to be tested and more organisations to gain experience,” even if in end DTI will choose single entity.

James Reid, of domain name system (DNS) solution provider Nominum, and member of UKEG, expects wide range of participants for U.K. ENUM trial. “Expressions of interest have to be sent in by the middle of next month,” he said. Besides possible Tier One providers NeuStar, Nominet or Centralnic, mobile providers Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens are on his list, as well as companies such as Hotsip, vendor of server software for Session Initiation Protocol and presence products. ENUM is viewed potentially as big step forward toward bridging worlds of IP and circuit-switched telephony.

Richard Stastny, chief engineer of Telecom Austria subsidiary Oefeg, said his company was focusing on setup of Voice-over-IP servers for Austrian ENUM trial, which will involve end users in Nov. “At this moment, we work heavily to fill our DNS servers with the data and to test clients for data requests,” Stastny said. He plans to present results of first European ENUM trial start at the VON/Tiphon conference in Atlanta 2 weeks from now, he said.

The slow pace of ENUM development in Europe and internationally in Stastny’s view is mainly consequence of hard times telecom providers and ISPs are experiencing. Investment in new technologies such as ENUM services aren’t in vogue now, he said, and convergence is viewed anxiously by ISPs and former incumbents alike. “It is funny, that in Austria ISPs are afraid of telcos, but in Sweden the telcos are afraid of ISPs,” Stastny said. Former incumbents like his company certainly need to think of new business models, he said: “You have to accept that you won’t make money on mere data transportation. You need to think along new business models.”

Stastny thus is optimistic, he says, that ENUM in Europe now will gather steam. European ENUM trial operators from Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. are beginning to work on compatibility of ENUM clients. While cooperation on technical level evolves, consensus on some political questions is lacking. Together with Chinese and French ITU representatives, some German RegTP officials continue to opt for an alternative to e164.arpa, which they see as U.S.-dominated. “We would appreciate more internationalization in the DNS in general,” said representative of the German Ministry of Commerce, “but at this moment we will not stop ENUM anyway.”