These are unedited transcripts and may contain errors.
ENUM Working Group, 2nd November, 2011, at 2 p.m.:
CHAIR: So, welcome everybody. This is the ENUM Working Group session of RIPE 63, so if you are meant to go to Routing, then it's not going to happen here, but in the next room. Welcome to, as I said, welcome to the session of the ENUM Working Group here in Vienna. I hope you have had all the good lunch and my name is Carsten Schiefner, I am one of the co chairs of the Working Group, the other one is Niall O'Reilly, and I'd like to walk you through the agenda we have been able to put together for today.
Under A: We have the administrivia. Welcome, we are just about to be there. B is the blessing of the previous minutes. C is the review of the action list.
Then we have D, the main presentations. And under E, are presentations about ENUM operations and F is short news. And then we are about to be done anyways.
In terms of the agenda, are there any suggestions to change something with the agenda? If not then I have a change; we'd like to put the ENUM operations reports after C, before D, the main presentations, just because Patrik Falstrom was meant to give that presentation, unfortunately can't be here with us because he had to reschedule for an appointment with the ITU in Geneva.
The scribe is almost always, I am inclined to say, is Alex le Hu. And we have Andreas being the one in charge of the web cast and the audio cast.
The microphone etiquette is if you have a comment, a question or whatever, please state your name before you actually start to ask a question or to make a comment.
Coming to agenda item B, the minutes of the previous meetings. Niall has just sent around an e mail confirming that all the minutes of RIPE 60, 61 and 62 are not final. They have been out for like three or four months now with a small correction to RIPE 62 in terms of a comment from banney /HAOUPB /HAOEUZen.
Reviewing the action list, yeah, there was only one open action item so far under two co chairs, that was organising a panel discussion and we have fortunately we have that scheduled for today under item D, the main presentations. But as I said, before the main presentation and the panel discussion, we'd like to have the operations report first. So that would be Wolfgang and then Patrik remotely. So Wolfgang, if you could do the presentation. Thank you.
Wolfgang: Good afternoon everybody. So, traditionally we give a short update of the ENUM work that we are doing within the RIPE NCC and this time I'd like to get
First off, there has been a change within the RIPE NCC. There is a new department which was created earlier this year which is called global information infrastructure. That's now where all the DNS services are residing and the basic aim behind that department was to consolidate the external, what we call the external ICC services of the RIPE NCC. So those are the all the services that are operated outside of the traditional RIPE NCC network in Amsterdam. I have a short listing here so we have with the DNS services including the ENUM operation. TTM, which on tonne of it running DNSMON, INRDB, the whole RIS routing collector deployments and something new here which we call a storage analysis infrastructure. I'll give more detail about that in a DNS Working Group tomorrow.
Most of you are familiar with this. What are the DNS services that happen RIPE NCC is providing. Top of those is the recertificates DNS for our members so all the IP blocks that we get allocated or got allocated from IANA and then further delegate them to our members.
Secondary DNS for other RIRs is just to help out with the stability of those K roots since 1997 and now in this since the last meeting, the F reverse, which the in A DD H have been migrated on a dead said set of services. Before that there was no balance the IPv6 arpa for instance of operated on a best effort by some of the RIRs. In ADDR was on some of the route servers and so on. This has been consolidated on R reverse now where all the RIRs are operating those servers.
Also we do secondary DNS for some ccTLDs. Those ccTLDs are developing ccTLDs that can not yet afford to buy the service from some commercial provider. And for this Working Group here we have the ENUM tier zero zone, and a bit exotic the AS 112 node. I am not going to go into more details about that.
Advancing the DNS services of the RIPE NCC. We used to have all those DNS service except K root operated out of the RIPE NCC network in apples err dam. As a data point here, more than 90 percent of the traffic that was on that network was relating to those services. So, in order to not over provision that network and drop that traffic directly on the edge and also allow us to scale this more efficiently, we decided to move all of those services out of our traditional network and into a separate autonomous system so that we can go and Anycast those. By now we have two deployments for that, one in London and one in Amsterdam and we have most of our critical services on to that already. There is only the ccTLD service left which is currently ongoing and needs a lot of communications with those ccTLDs. A little bit of data points here. Unfortunately nothing on that has changed since RIPE 62. This chart shows you what our signed parents are. Those are zones that we have some delegations from to us. So we have classically the biggest chunk here in the IPv6 arpa and in ADDR arpa for all the blocks that are dedicated to us. And in arpa, that's the 1 E 16 arm a zone of course. Broken out, the white part are the zones, our parent zones, not our own zones, where we can not yet provision DS records because another not signed or they are not ready yet to accept those DS records from us.
I gave that projection at RIPE 62 saying, instead of by late 2011 I said fall 2011. I correct that had to by late 2011. I contacted all of our parents that don't yet allow us to provision DS records and they assured mere that they are still on track and we are going to be able to actually put DS records in there.
So, our truth should be that we only have those three parents zones here, INT and CC, where we can not yet have a full chain of trust from the root down.
So that's good news here.
For ENUM delegation updates. There is been again only one change since RIPE 62, that's Qatar with plus 974 which has been put in there in July of 2011. I am not sure if, so Patrik is going to talk a little bit about the Swedish things that have been going on so I'll not go into that.
For the signed zones, again no change since RIPE 62. I don't know if we have a colleague from Portugal here this time. So maybe he can answer the question of the DS record here. We are see that Portugal is signed but we don't see the DS record in the E164 arpa zone yet.
We always have this data point here to try to show what might be the countries that are the country codes that are most asked for in 164 arpa. So we look at one day and we look at what for which country codes do we receive queries which are not delegated. Here, we have a little bit of a biased in that data because there seems to be one single system in the network of Turkey com, that already was the case during RIPE 62 which we have broken out hereunto separate pie charts that actually creates 98 percent of those undelegated queries. So in order to not bias the rest of those I have broken that out. That really just seems to be a wrongly configured S we contacted them after RIPE 62, unfortunately we didn't get a response here. It's not creating a problem for us. It's just a bias in this data here. But if we look at the rest of the data, there is actually no major change since RIPE 62 except this one here. We don't really know what plus 00 really is. The only reference we found to it is Europe international dial prefix. One of the theories we have is there has been some harmonisation within the European Union on dialling plans going on and maybe this is a side effect or something like that. We don't quite know, but it is a quite big number. So it suggests that it's actually wider spread. If anybody has an idea what that actually is, we don't know for sure. Other than that, this data is stable with Russia being second after the US for the most queried and not yet delegated ENUM zones.
Lameness: My favourite picture. It just doesn't change. We have two delegations in here that are totally Lame. That means they cannot be resolved. So they are in E164 arpa but obviously not used because they just don't work. Then we have part brokenness which ranges from one server to a couple of servers but it's still resolvable, so unfortunately out of 50 delegations in the ENUM zone, there are eight that don't work as they should and two of them are completely broken right now.
And that actually already brings me to the end that have status update. I am happy to take your questions and feedback on this. Okay. Thanks.
CHAIR: Thank you, Wolfgang. We have the next presentation on the screen already, that is Patrik Falstrom again who can the be with us right now because of other appointments in Geneva. The presentation is on the screen already and I see a call coming in already welcome Patrik, and the floor is yours so to speak. Thank you.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Thank you very much. So what I will try to explain is a little bit on what happened or what has happened with country code 46 for Sweden. There are some issues here that you will see that is involving the Swedish regulator. I do know that Erika Hersaeus from the regulator is in the room so if there are questions that are a little bit confusing or something or that I drop out, she can also answer the questions. I will also arrive to Vienna tonight so that I can answer questions tomorrow and Friday.
CHAIR: There is one thing I'd like to ask you, because we can't see you on the screen because there is just one screen and that is occupied with with your presentation already. Like, whenever you'd like us to switch from one slide to the other, just wave because I can see you here on the little screen. Okay.
PATRIK FALSTROM: So, the second slide. So what happened was...
CHAIR: We have the first slide on I mean the second one with background.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Okay. That's better. It was... can the sound engineers do something?
So what happened that was regulator in Sweden a trial to start in the very early days of user ENUM and there was quite a large amount of interest in Sweden by market players and that is something that we saw in many of the other countries as well in the beginning of 2000. The trial itself was running between 2001 and 2004.
Next slide:
The organisation .se that also runs the top level domain SE agreed to at no cost run the registry during the trial. In 2006, after the trial, there was a contract written between the regulator, PTS, and .se, the registry on continued operation after the trial. This was not a straight commercial situation but it was still an agreement between the two organisations. .se registry in turn, just like it's doing with the top level domain, was writing a contract with the DNS operators of the actual DNS.
Next slide:
What also was created was a loosely co ordinated ENUM forum and the agreement was that registrars to ENUM and the providers were the providers that hold E.164 numbers. This because we needed a simple way for the registrars to be able to validate that the request was coming from someone that was actually using a very specific E.164 number to minimise the risks was someone was using ENUM and a registrar that didn't do good validation to steal traffic.
The ENUM forum itself was discontinued due to lack of interest from all the users. Basically no one came to the meetings, so it just died.
Next slide:
.se registry wanted the temporary agreement to be placed by a new long term stable agreement. The registry saw increased interest for ENUM, and to be able to write good agreements with their customers, they felt like they needed more stable operation. For example, there was a request to start using ENUM from the Swedish National Association of the Deaf.
For .se point of view they didn't get much feedback on this request of getting a new contract, so in March 2010 .se cancelled the contract with the regulator. The intention was to renegotiate but continue to run a read only registry for user ENUM E.146.
The regulated presidents was PTS was decided to be the designated manager in Sweden in September 2010.
The regulator further presented two different proposals for a new registered contractor .se that both were rejected by the registry and this, because the registry viewed the contracts to still be short term solutions just like the first one that they cancelled, so the registry did not see the two proposed contracts as being solutions to the problem that they pointed out in the first place.
Next slide:
What the regulator did was to investigate the user ENUM and draw a conclusion that there is very little commercial interest in user ENUM in Sweden. Out of the only about 17.5 million telephone subscriptions, there were only about 50 subscriptions for user ENUM that the regulator could find. Most of those 50 were exactly the same that were active during the trial which means that there had not been many new registrations, if any at all. The regulator also checked the status from other European countries via CEPT and was informed that user ENUM activities were nearly non existing in most of the countries.
Next slide:
PTS drew the conclusion that the only thing they could do was to accept to withdraw all the contracts with the regulator on 1 July 2011 concerning the role as an ENUM Tier 1 registry and on the 8 July, 2011, the regulator requested at RIPE NCC and ITNU to withdraw the delegation.
One small Telco in Sweden detected the domain to be withdrawn and in their operation, they need ENUM to be up and running even though there were very few numbers, so what happened was that they complained to the Swedish Government.
Next slide:
Swedish Government stepped in and requested the stopped the request to withdraw the domain delegation and the regulator was asked to further investigate the situation for user ENUM in Sweden.
This was kind of interesting because it happened also during vacation time and a lot of people were off site and the domain or the delegation was to be removed and the RIPE NCC and both RIPE NCC and ITU were quite active in this, so there were lots of telephone calls in all different kinds of of directions until it was decided that the revocation should be withdrawn. And a little bit later, the regulator sent in communication to RIPE NCC and ITU and asked the delegation to stay.
For the time being, there are no new decisions available concerning the future user ENUM in Sweden but the regulator is still working on the issues.
There... done...
CHAIR: I guess I didn't get the last bit. You are done?
PATRIK FALSTROM: I am done with the presentation, yes.
CHAIR: Thank you Patrik, are there any questions regarding this presentation or it withdrawal or any comments regarding maybe the future of ENUM in Sweden under E.164.arp a.
I might have actually a question. And that is, apart from the fact that the delegation had been withdrawn, say, administratively, by this back and forth between the IPU, PTS and RIPE NCC and so forth but the zone itself technically also disappeared from the DNS space, is that right?
PATRIK FALSTROM: No, the zone itself has always been up and running at the operators of the zone itself which include net node in Stockholm that is running DNS for country code 47 as well as for the top level domain SC.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Again, any questions regarding the withdrawal of the Swedish ENUM zone? If not, then thank you very much Patrik.
PATRIK FALSTROM: I can give a personal comment to this. One thing that we see in Sweden is that people would like to use user ENUM. That's what we hear from the .se registry, but the registrations cannot be done just because it's not long term and at the same time, we can not get any long term operation just because there are no registrations. So to some degree, personally, I think that at the moment we are sort of in a deadlock of some kind. So, from my perspective, I think it's good that the ball is back at the regulator very clearly and they have to come with some kind of suggestions of what we should do in Sweden. But until that is coming, and I have no idea how long time that will take, the ENUM zone is read only and but still up and running.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Okay. Thank you very much. I hope I don't know what your schedule looks like, but I do hope that you can stay on a little bit longer for the upcoming panel discussion we are going to have right now. So I don't know whether that is possible or not? Would you like to stay?
PATRIK FALSTROM: I'll hang around.
CHAIR: The next item on the agenda is now the panel discussion no sorry.
I have just been alerted, it's not yet the panel discussion. My apologies. I'd like to ask Lino Santos on the stage to give his presentation about the ENUM efforts and protocol under 351 and moving quite a bit of numbers from the end err ENUM.
LINO SANTOS: Good afternoon and thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and to present the status of the ENUM trial in Portugal.
Just a little bit of story. Is the national regulator authority. FCCN was invited and signed under the understanding with Anacom to provide the services of tier 1 registry. SECN is a private non profit foundation that runs the academic network. It runs also the PP TLD register, so it has a lot of experience with this position. It also has a huge project on voice, it's called VoIP at RCTS, which is the acronym of our network, the same as ACOnet here in Austria, which has been 40,000 DID numbers registered under the nrenum.net.
This is a I am sorry for the Portuguese picture, I couldn't find to change it to English, but you can see, the network on the middle, RCTS, and we have two institutions, institution 1 and 2, each institution has several campus, each campus has a traditional legacy PBX and what we have done in 2007 was to a couple IP telephony infrastructure next to each one of these traditional legacy PBX forming a virtual private network within each institution and then a virtual private network among the Portuguese research and academic network.
The red arrows explain the seep sections between campuses and between institutions and between institutions and the public back works, with seep trunks and the blue ones are legacy PSTN ISDN connections. We have crime back mechanism between these two technologies that are able to bring redundancy to the whole solution.
We use ENUM to create the routing table between all these campuses. And between campuses and public networks of course.
Back to the trial. FCCN and Anacom signed on the understanding of this year, a one year period. Anacom invited the public operators to join to the trial and sign the same memorandum of understanding and FCCN invited the registrars, the Portuguese registrars to join too.
Now, we have about five participants, most of them are operators, big operators, and some are VoIP operators only.
The rules for trial are not yet defined. We have rough consensus on which numbers are to be included in the trial, so geographical numbers, mobile numbers, and tell free numbers and know mad numbers are included in the trial. All participants agreed on this one. We also agreed on the technical requisites on tier 1 and tier 2 name servers. What we are still discussing is the validation process and the technical inspection of NAT TR data in order to provide the quality of the ENUM data.
During the summer we made a questionnaire to our participants trying to find out what their motivations were, and what functions within the ENUM service model they would be interested in performing. Concerning motivation, all the participants answered that the motivation for ENUM are the expectation to provide new services in a complementary way with the present service portfolio and the functions, well that differs a lot among participants. Some of them think that they had to do the whole thing, and some of them are interested in performing the register only and the tier 2 name server only. This is I think the big issues right now to converge the solution.
Ending up with FCCN goals for 2012. We are going to make a public tender for the voice private network for our national research and education network. That would be done by the end of January. We'll have new seep trunks working and of course after that, we will want to my great and renumber data to the golden tree I guess by the end of the first quarter, I think by the end of first quarter we'll have about 40,000 DIDs within the Portuguese golden tree. And that's all.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: I might actually have one. My question is, concerning those who currently are participating in your trial that includes VoIP operators if I got that correctly, but also plain, normal PSDN operators as well.
A. Yes.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Are they, compared to the legacy operator in Portugal, are these large operators or rather large operators or just like small operators?
LINO SANTOS: The incumbent is not in the trial, if that's the question. For instance, [Zon] is the second biggest operator and is actually providing VoIP service at the moment.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Okay. Thank you.
Thank you lean owe once more. But now, I guess it is really time to call all the panelists to the stage for the panel discussion. I would like to see lean owe once more. Denesh Bhabuta, who actually started all this. Patrik Falstrom if he is still available. Andre Philippe from the Czech registry, Szegedi, and Robert Schischka. I am going to hand you over to the other co chair, Niall O'Reilly, please Niall. Thank you.
NIALL O'REILLY: Thanks, Carsten. Have we got Patrik still with us? If he surfaces, he surfaces. What I'd like to do is go to the next slide please first. Because it has everybody's name on it and then I'd like to ask everybody on the panel to introduce themselves quite quickly before we start into the discussion.
ANDRE PHILIPPE: I am Andre Philippe, we are the domain operator for and we started ENUM I think it was like in 2005, something like that. And currently we are running ENUM registry for the Czech Republic. We do have some delegations in that registry, and we try to be quite active in the past years, we try to push ENUM, we tried to propagate it, and honestly speaking now, we are at the stage where we are not canal selling or removing the project but we are really not very active, just waiting what's going to happen. That's the current state news my company.
PETER SZEGEDI: I am a project officer at TERENA. And that's the European association of networks, and then runs run a private ENUM service which is called the [nrenum].net service, and the role in this service is to bridge the gap especially for those who want a trial with ENUM services and just start, for example, the Portuguese, and I just heard this presentation from Sweden to I'd just like them to suggest the nrenum. and the golden tree can start with the trial just like the Portuguese guys did with the nrenum.net tree and then easily migrate later on. So we run that service, actually the N runs run that service as a kind of trial for ENUM and that's the reason why I am here.
DENESH BHABUTA: I am not actually involved with ENUM right now but I was at one time. He was director of which was the governing body for ENUM within the UK. The thing is that I actually got quite frustrated over the years with everyone coming to the Working Group and saying this is what we are doing within our country with respect to ENUM and even when I used to come and do the presentations explaining what the UK was doing, we were always repeating the same thing over and over and over again, but nothing was actually moving forward. And so I suggested about three RIPE meetings ago that we have a panel discussion, an open discussion about actually what's happening and maybe have a joint effort going forward as in this is what we can realistically do, so that's why I am here.
ROBERT SCHISCHKA: I am the General Manager the Austrian registry and we are also running the ENUM production system. We have been quite active in the trial phase for several years and in 2004 we think we were the first one to sign the commercial consider with regulator opening up a stable environment where the carries can rely on, saying that acceptance of this product really relies on stable contracts where they can design something which can be called a product. Nevertheless, after the big interest of the trial, later on a lot of big carries disappeared, especially the incumbent, I think that's experience most other countries have faceed in a similar wear. Currently we have about let's say 6 to 7 registrars where two or three of them are a little bit more active than the others. We have about 8 thousand delegations due to the special construction of the open numbering plan in Austria, this translates to roughly 25,000 users. This has been stable over the last years, a little bit of increasing and degreesing, depending on, we have some thresholds on charging for the delegations and depending on this sometimes a block of numbers is deleted. Others are delegated but more or less it's at a very low level stable in the last numbers.
Interesting thing is we also learn that might be an interest on a more carrier friendly model, everybody says that user ENUM is a great thing for the user but it's a kind of contradiction to what the carriers on termination fees and so on likes but there may be a used case for carrier ENUM for voice over IP, even carry with the replacing of our regular layering caving contract there and surprise, surprise, even less people show up in carrier ENUM and user ENUM. I don't know how to present what's the reason, my best guess is that voice over interconnect. First of all it's lacking some rules, how to charge, for instance, what kind of technical standards. It's much less clear than it is the number 7 world.
The other thing is that most parties most interested in the ENUM are the users same to the carrier are small parties. And the large market participants have something to lose. And Austria maybe is a country too small to have enough small carriers to be kind of gather a critical mass to get this thing started. That was one of the reasons we looked with great interest what's happening in other countries like the UK where I think the whole idea of having this carrier records user ENUM looks promising in getting things started but as far as I know the big up take is yet to come.
LINO SANTOS: Director on security services at the FCCN and as I said, a new be trial started just this year, so, I think we have a lot to learn from successes and mistakes from others in this Working Group.
NIALL O'REILLY: Do we have Patrik still online? Your turn Patrik.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Patrik full symptom Cisco, and I am involved in ENUM just because I came up with this beast and whether, I don't really know whether it was something really really good or or not we see the up take is not really good. I have worked with ENUM for quite sometimend I am also an adviser to the Swedish Government and as you understand from this presentation I have been quite involved also in what happened in Sweden.
NIALL O'REILLY: Exceptionally for a RIPE presentation, we start with the questions because it's a panel discussion and I'd like to give the audience the opportunity to ask some questions first so that we don't prejudice it from the inside. If not, I think Denesh, you mentioned you had some question for lean owe, we might start with that.
DENESH BHABUTA: Well just a general question for everyone really. I'll start with lean owe. You mentioned that, you mentioned some names. Now I spent quite a bit of time in Portugal and I recognise nice those names. The only one that I see doing any sort of VoIP services really is /STKPWHROPB car bow and not any of the others. But the thing is that what I see happening here is, similar mistakes or similar experiences to what happened in the UK where the trial goes through, telcos sign up but then nothing actually happens. So, my question so you is, what is what are your plans to get ENUM working, not from the private interconnect side but from the user ENUM side?
LINO SANTOS: Too direct. Well, there is no plan actually, so what we are trying, and I must talk on behalf of FCCN, what we try and what we see that could benefit the users would be to aggregate as much as you can the functions of the ENUM service model. As I said before, some of the operators state that, well we are interested but the best way to implement this is for you to delegate all our numbers and we'll deal with the rest. That's one point.
So, what we are trying, what FCCN is trying on behalf of the users is to disaggregate as much as it can the functions within the ENUM service model. So I think there is a model for registrars. I think there is a market for ISPs to provide tier 2 named server. And this must not be the usual players must not be the operator as it is. It could be everyone. I think the user would like to choose which registrar and which name server they want. That's what we are trying to do.
PETER SZEGEDI: May I pick up on this. We have been thinking along exactly the same lines and if you look back at some of the documents developed in this area, which some of my team has written, we tried to pay a lot of attention that validation, registration, name server provider, service provider and number holder may be different roles and there may be an open market to get things started. That sounds very reasonable. Reality has shown that this simply doesn't fly because it's too complex and actually the validation, if you live in an environment where you are asked to revalidate that you are the legitimate owner of the number year after year, it means a high burdenen and a high amount of work and actually money to spend at the end of the day and the only, let's call it, successful registrars we have seen in our systems are those are the number range, the servers and the custom all belong to one single entity because then the whole validation process is a no brainer as long as the customer is in your customer database, the number is validated. That's it and that's the only thing which has worked in our environment. Maybe you are more lucky and my blessings to this, but we have seen that the theorethical approach, what kind of market model might be there, and we have designed a lot of intelligent protocols around certificates and to make it as open as possible. And reality has shown that the service providers hate the idea that the customers calls them, and saying the land line doesn't work and now they have to figure out is something wrong with the validation, have the customer failed to revalidate the number, has he failed to pay for his ENUM delegation, has something gone wrong in the name server, is the NAPTR not correct, and you can add hundreds of other things to it and that's part of the problem. It is a very, very complex product and our lessons learned is nobody buys ENUM. The best you can get is that somebody asking you for phone servers which has some characteristics, one of them making free phone calls to a lot of friends and the other one maybe is educated which also has ENUM. But the ENUM by stand alone is very, very hard to sell in the market. At least in those markets I have seen.
Andre: I just want to confirm what Robert has said. We had a Cima approach and we ended up there are basically three types of customers that register ENUM in a registry. There is a few geeks who is run them by the themselves but it's like, 10, 20 people, something like that. Then there are university guys and they do currently there are just a portion of ENUM registration. Okay, so we cover roughly half a million telephone numbers, but it's just done by a few large blocks from universities. And the cert at least at the end of 2008 was the biggest part of the registry where people that are validated, and covered by voice over IP operators so in that time we had 5,000 registration just because a single company decided to support it. I don't see really any demand for splitting of those roles. My feeling is you know the name as Robert has described.
PETER SZEGEDI: My comment is I also fully agreed with that one single point of management would be good, and actually that's the good in the N re number net service because the single registry registrar stuff like that and that's why it works. And to me, this whole ENUM thing is a kind of chicken and egg problem because you want to convince your Government and various people to take up with ENUM but you don't have something it to show which actually works. And if you start first with this ENUM trial service and as I said our policies is more lightweight, so you can easily start with them, then you can and from NRENUM.net and you can migrate to ENUM later on, at least you have something to play with and hopefully you can convince all the bodies that you have to convince in your country to start with it and a good example is I think Portugal and another one is Norway and Norway is quite close to Sweden and I know they are famous of collaborations in the Nordic countries among each other, so they could try and discuss with union net that Norway, who are the most active partners and participants in renum.net servers and I don't know what phase they are in the that part, but I know this they are using nrenum.net successfully.
NIALL O'REILLY: Denesh, before you come in I think Patrik wants to say something?
PATRIK FALSTROM: I think, as you heard, we have an issue in Sweden regarding the use of ENUM and I think it's the same kind of problem as we heard in all the other countries and den I shall and myself has also been talking during the years about the issues in the UK and similarities to Sweden that providers of services do think that the, they do see a connection between the service they provide and the telephone number itself and disconnecting the two is probably difficult. So, but on the other hand, in the Sweden, as I said it has stalled just because at the moment it's not even possible for people to register things in ENUM at the moment and it's been like that for a couple of years.
What I do see, though, is that in Sweden with this request, for example, for the organisation of the delve is that ENUM is interesting for not telephony but for other things and services you would like to use for telephone numbers you would identify for, but we need to sort of boot strap that as well so we'll see what is happening. This is one of the reasons why I personally don't want to see ENUM in Sweden go away because it stops the ability to innovate. The next problem of course is to be able to for example for me to be able to use my own phone number in my own DNS and that is very, very difficult as the Telcos do not allow that [](deaf) thank you.
LINO SANTOS: I must be one of the geeks mentioned because my seven week old daughter has an ENUM based number. But apart from that, I just wanted to say, not that I want to pick on Portugal here, but because you are quite new in here, maybe there is something, some sort of advice or pointers that I can give.
One of the things that I spoke with the Indian Government a few years ago at one of the IGF meetings about their up take of ENUM, and they said that what they wanted to do was that they wanted to sort out their number portability problems first before they looked at ENUM and I suggested that ENUM was actually a very good solution for number portability. And what we with found in the UK is that even know end user ENUM hasn't really worked, in a way it's sort of failed, there are carriers who are working on private ENUM trees to look at number portability because really, number portability is very, very easy when you implement it via ENUM. Even Ofcom in the UK are now coming around to that idea.
One of the things with Portugal that I have noticed is that there doesn't seem to be any number portability. You have introduce add new number. 3 zero and that's where ENUM would work, for example I wanted a wanted a land line in Lisbon over VoIP and I just can't get one. Also, with your mobile operators, Vodafone and 91 and TMN are 93 or something and there doesn't seem to be any way of transferring your number from one to another and in that way the Telco market, even though it's quite advanced from the number portability point of view, it seems a bit too traditional for want of a better word.
So, in those cases, I think what everyone needs to think about is that rather than thinking it like the UK did that we'll have two databases one for public and private and carrier ENUM and another one for end user ENUM. Really you should think about just having one database, and that's it really.
LINO SANTOS: We do have portability service between our operators a long time ago, so it doesn't use ENUM for that. But, I agree with you, there is infrastructure ENUM and user ENUM, and I think I know the big operators are working with infrastructure ENUM and as you see there, they are not interested in user ENUM, but I agree with you, it would be the same, yeah.
DENESH BHABUTA: I can come back at this point.
Now the thing is that Patrik, maybe you can correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't the idea of having ENUM so that there were no boundaries when it came to telephone numbers?
PATRIK FALSTROM: Yeah, there were two ideas. The first one was to be able to use the telephone numbers for any kind of service that could be referred to, it's anything where you could point out an end point of a service with ERI or whatever the result, that was one thing.
The second which means using telephone numbers rather than the traditional PSDN voice. The second thing was to give the ability for the end user, that is ultimately the one that you reach by using that phone number, the freedom and the ability to have that phone number referred to whatever provider of the service that the end user did choose and specifically it it could be one end point service provider for the voice and another one for video so the whole idea with ENUM was to create an enormous degree of freedom. What we have seen in the market economy later on is maybe it was the case there were a little bit too many degrees of freedom and unfortunately in the infrastructure it's difficult to deploy ENUM with limited degrees of freedom but not as much as as it actually gives you. Thank you.
ROBERT SCHISCHKA: Maybe one remarks. Especially the attitude of regulators limiting the use of certain number ranges. For example, normal land line must have a physical determination end point and may not be ported to any kind of virtual line does not really help a lot in this circumstance. So, I totally agree, the whole idea of empowering the end user is quite sexy, but if the market forces do not support this and the regulator are not willing to step in and nobody really creates the killer product idea, who should be the driver? The idea of porting my number to a virtual service is quite nice but if the regulator then says yes but if you want to geographic number for Vienna you have to have a physical termination end point there. End of story. And then we end up with all those nice number ranges for voice over IP services which are newly introduced and takes years to be reachable all over the world. We have a voice over number in Austria, it took us about three years to make it a little bit reachable, a hundred percent coverage, never, ever and the worst thing it's not even stable. So you can travel to Sweden and pick up the phone, make a call, it works perfectly. Five minutes later, no luck, depending on what kind of international transit things are around, what kind of carrier is selected or whatever kind of circumstances you have. So it's really a nightmare to push new operators in new freshly open up number rangeses is actually discriminating the services because the customer experience is just horrible for at least several years. So, if there is not willingness to push those carriers on a plain level field that happen doesn't help. The driving forces are coming from too small companies to make this successful.
One technical remark which we found quite interesting at the very first beginning of the whole ENUM and voice over IP thing everybody was so much worried about speed, there will be enormous amount of spend coming and it will be impossible to use this. We have not seen one single incident on this bit but we have seen another problem which force one of our larger companies to turn off user ENUM. It was very interesting set up, was a company manufacturing machines and they have a really international set up of factories in the Czech Republic, in Austria, in Canada and Australia, they are using user ENUM to interconnect their premises and their phone system and they use it for several years was quite successful and the reason for turning it off was enormous amount of brute force hacking attacks on their open seep proxies and that's the core problem. The whole user ENUM forces the end point to be public reachable by more or less everybody. At the moment you start filtering there you are drawing a certain amount of value and that makes it open to all kinds of nasty attacks. It was a very interesting lessons learned from us so speed has not been an issue, I am not saying it might be issue tomorrow but brute force attacks is a really really bad issue to be considered.
Andre: I have a question to Patrik, I am sorry, I don't have any real comment. But up to today we are talking about ENUM like it equals to Internet telephoning. I think if I was listening correctly Patrik you said there was interest in some other services except voice over IP in Sweden, did I catch the remark true? Can you elaborate a little bit about that?
PATRIK FALSTROM: Yes, that is true. And it's specifically for people that are deaf that cannot use that would like to have the telephone linked to other services like text telephony and chapt and other kind of things. We have also at Cisco seen some interest in getting better linkage between telephone numbers and, for example, video conferencing systems that we call telepresence and those kinds of things. So now we start to see services being deployed that use CPR Is and other kinds of identifiers, so identifiers that are closed within deployed systems and a higher interest of actually wanting to use the telephone E164 numbers for those end points.
On the other hand, for that to work the E164 numbers still must be available to be able to use for these kind of deployments and that is a big barrier. The other big barrier might be that SIP telephony is also something that is a little bit complicated for normal users to use. Finally with SIP, you end up buying a SIP trunk from a Telco and then the Telco takes care of everything which means that SIP addressing is not used much for that either, but those are the kind of interesting new service that could be interesting for ENUM. On the other hand, if it is the case that the telephone numbers are not available, which is something that is up to the regulator, absolutely agree with the previous speaker, in that case I think that these services will forever use some other identifier than E164 numbers. Thank you.
DENESH BHABUTA: I don't want to come back on that. I want to go forward from that but if there are any questions, then please...
NIALL O'REILLY: I have a question. It seems to me that here we are, like road workers on the some kind of of super highway and we are all looking at the pot hole and we don't have the right diggers or shovels or things to know what to do next. And I am wondering what part of the mind set around numbering do we have to work at first to try and unjam, to untie the knot that seems to be tied around the numbers.
PATRIK FALSTROM: This is Patrik. I think all of us are working on deployment new services with new identifiers and if it is the case that the regulators do not allow us to use E164 numbers we will do our deployment over the new services with something else. It's very easy.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Hello everyone. This is Erika Hersaeus from the Swedish Posts and Telecoms Agency. I just want to make some clarifications in the case of Sweden and plus 46. I believe that PTS put forward two different kinds of agreements to .se, how they could become the registry of a user ENUM domain, and they did not accept any of these agreements, and what I have understood was that PTS does not believe that the State should finance the registry, and that was the clash, and that's from that was why it led to what happened afterwards. But what I want to say is that our continuous work is to make a concession, like a procurement, and we want to see the interest in Sweden for who wants to run a registry for user ENUM, so this will happen in the spring of 2012. Thank you.
Carsten?
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: I have a question, or is it a comment, I don't know really know to all of you five on the panel. We have heard a bit already that in essence, ENUM is not just about voice over IP, it's essentially using this kind of 10 key pat to identify to identify certain end points and essentially to access all sorts of like Internet services. My question is: Why would you think why do you believe nobody like an Internet service providers, small but highly innovative companies, put all these pieces together to create actually a service, as you rightly pointed out, ENUM itself is not yet a service, it's a basic technology and I have stolen that exactly from you. Is there a market for toll charges? Yes, there is but it's strictly B to B market. Nobody ever would come to a shop and try to buy a trouble charger to mount that similar self or herself onto the engine and believe that after that the engine would still run. So, my question really is: Internet service providers did the trick 15 years ago roughly that the customer, and they are still doing that very same trick, the customer comes with an idea for a domain name and the Internet service provider, the registrar does everything else, name service, mail service, web service. The only thing we really have to have in mind is a domain name and maybe a great concept about your website, maybe what you want to do with your domain name in the web sphere. So that idea transferred or transported into ENUM would be the only thing I have is my phone number and you give me a various plethora of services around that, not just VoIP but other things and my question is: Why would you believe, why do you believe nobody ever came up with innovative services around ENUM?
DENESH BHABUTA: Yeah. This was actually I was going to go on to which was actually asking everyone, what is it we want to achieve with ENUM and it sort of leads on to what you are asking. Actually it comes down to exactly as my colleague here has said, it comes down to money. Service providers do not really want to offer a service if they do not see a market for it. However you have hit the nail on the head, I have always said that we should not be selling ENUM as a service, it should be ENUM as a technology underlying a service sold to end users. If you look at some technology users like apple or whatever, they will sell a concept, an idea and what we are trying to do generally within ENUM within Europe is we are trying to sell ENUM but that's not what we should be doing.
NIALL O'REILLY: There is a small delay after I press the on switch on this, I am sorry. It it seems to me then that, to come back to something Patrik said a few moments ago, it's about finding identifiers to hang these interesting services on. And unifying different it wases through the use of a common identifier. And as Patrik put it, if the telephone number isn't going to be an effective unified identifier, then the people offering the services will pick a different one. So, there seems to me to be a challenge there for the people who control the number space and that's usually the regulators, to see the opportunity for engauging in that innovation or ignoring it. Is that a fair comment, do you think?
ROBERT SCHISCHKA: To be honest, I think there is more than one reason why ENUM is not terribly successful but one thing is for sure, having each country one by one getting the regulator to ask for the delegation, finding a stable registry, running it in a stable way and make it reliable, does really not help the whole thing because I had some customers who are very, very interested in a certain setup, it's not the masses, it's not talking about millions of customers, but some companies, small to medium sized companies who want to no be embraced too much by their carrier but being able to choose one carrier in another part of the country and another carrier in another part of country, then interconnecting their own premises using ENUM and their own dial plan and making life much easier. Of course you can pre configure all those routes or buy some products from larger ISPs who serve the same purpose but ENUM would have been a very attractive and flexible solution. One of the reasons they feel is the outlet in Italy works once a year and then it doesn't work any more. For some other country, the delegation was withdrawn, or deleted or never asked for. So, to cover the map, they would have needed five, six, seven countries and out of seven, two were available in a stable way. So, that's not what people like to design services around. That's one of the reasons. The other reasons, coming back to the money is, who should offer a service where the income stream is more than unclear. For the carrier he loses money. He has to invest something and he loses money. The other problem is the whole ENUM idea suffers one problem, that somebody has to pay for the registry in the name service. It's not just for keeping track of a record into a database or selling air. It's just running an international stable 24 hour, seven days a week name server infrastructure to make so. That's not for me. So somebody has to pay for it, so either the regulator pace for it or the customer pays for it. So if you charge for the demain name, you end up in the situation that you are charged a fee for somebody else making free phone calls to you. And that's unfortunately usually a bad business proposal. If I pay for my domain name, I pay for somebody else can reach me and find my product, but if I disdeploy ENUM in a fully transparent way, what's the user experience? Somebody picks up the phone, dials a number and my phone rings, big deal. The big user experience is the guy calling me doesn't pay at all, anything or a lower fee. But why should I pay for somebody else to reduce his phone bill so that doesn't work out out at the user space either as a business case. And all those shiney new ideas and products are please step forward and present them to me, I would love to hear them. So I really would love to see one country to be so successful to say yes, we missed this million euro idea and you are absolutely my hero if you come up with with this idea. We failed find is now.
Andre: I would add to that. There is more than just money. We offer ENUM numbers for I think one check run a year which is 5 euro cents, so the registrars just cover those costs and give the ENUM for the people for free, but still there is no demand. Even for free it's not really interesting for the people and then they do not like the idea of validation because we are afraid that the number can be transferred to a different order. We require validation every six months and it's really something annoying for the people. So there is one problem as well as that we don't have any synchronisation with the database of the operators and the regulators so we create our own database of numbers and that's really something again costs money and it's annoying forth end user, so we give it to free and still it doesn't fly.
LINO SANTOS: I must agree with Patrik, we are talking about an IT for service and if I was a big company that wanted to use this idea like Google or Facebook or something to provide services to users, well, with the instability that is going on among several countries, not all countries, I wouldn't bet on ENUM. I think that's a problem, a chicken and egg problem.
DENESH BHABUTA: Okay. I'll put it out there. What's the answer? I mean, one of the things okay. A couple of things.
Generally, within Europe, what we found is that ENUM operators have just been it's just been left up to market force to say take over and okay, you have got the delegation, go ahead and do whatever needs to be done. On the other hand, we can go for something like Government intervention where Government actually sponsors ENUM takeup in some way. It was about two or three meetings ago that we heard the Malaysians talk about their implementation and how they seemed to be a bit more successful with their takeup of ENUM. Now, they weren't actually, as far as I remember, they weren't actually selling ENUM as a service. They were selling ENUM as a technology within a service which enhanced the end user experience. Now, that means that there was Government intervention. It was a Government who was involved in that. But why in Europe are we so scared of Government? Why don't we want to get Government involved in that level? I mean, I think Government may need teaching about ENUM, they may need to be trained about ENUM. So that they can actually understand it a bit more. In the UK we have this thing, let's, in business, let's keep the Government away from it. But I don't see why that would make such a big difference if it's already not working.
ROBERT SCHISCHKA: Actually I have not seen any Government opening up its pockets and spending an a lot of money on this. If you can point me to one I am happy to hear about it.
NIALL O'REILLY: I think certainly we haven't seen governments opening up their pockets words to ENUM, but I think there are quite a few governments in my limited experience, I can think of two European countries that I have some contact with where the governments are specifically interested in innovation, and innovation has become a buzz word. I know that this is an important priority for my own Government in Ireland. I understand from French friends that it's a priority for the French Government. I think it's the wrong scale. We should be looking at innovation at the European level rather than the national level because we want a critical size of market place and I don't see that ENUM is so much a special thing that to be treated far more hygienically than any other of the innovation targets, that it shouldn't be considered as a possible vehicle for innovation, too.
ROBERT SCHISCHKA: Thee ethically I fully agree that the problem is a little bit, you might get some funding for trials in terms of innovation. You will not get a lot of money for production services. Because that's where innovation stops, certain kinds of definitions, the transition from research and then something is done on a day to day, not so fancy operational business, and the other thing is, I think the reality is, everybody has failed in bringing up an ENUM business case and that's also part of innovation. To demonstrate something, it needs some additional money to develop something. And after a certain period, it might create a product which generates a constant stream of revenue to operate this and that's exactly where the make or break point is. If somebody comes up with an idea of a product which really is service that needs, maybe it has nothing to do with classical telephony service at all, it just uses the money space, somebody comes up with such an idea and demonstrates a business case, then it might be possible to get some money by private investors or governments whatever, but I think we are lacking this idea and just making phone calls for free is, I regret, I think that's not the ground breaking idea I see at the moment.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I do agree with Robert on that one. Wolfgang, I do agree with that, especially if you have seen in Austria for instance mobile phone providers have a massive competition going on and there is just almost no reason for you any more to ask for cheaper calls, but on the other note, on the other part of getting financing for this so that the problem is going to be to find an idea to actually evolve, especially since the Arab spring has been going on western and European governments are keen in putting money words to free communications and a long those lines, so if one is very creative there is a lot of money to get out of that.
ROBERT SCHISCHKA: You can receive a lot of money by intercepting those kinds of things, but that's my personal remark.
DENESH BHABUTA: I'll go again. So, basically, what we are saying that we need to, all the different European ENUM operators need to work together rather than working separately because that's what's been happening so far. We all need to work together on ideas.
ROBERT SCHISCHKA: May I ask a question to you, because UK was one of the countries where we really looked to having some promising ideas coming up and then they suddenly went completely silent, at least for me, I didn't hear anything. I last thing I heard was that British Telecom was very much interested in getting involved in the trial and then silence. So maybe could you educate us a bit what happened there or we just failed to turn on our receivers.
DENESH BHABUTA: I can't actually speak officially about them so these are my own viewpoints. I left the UK ENUM consortium about a year and a half ago and what happened was that yes, BT were actually very interested in the trials. However, when the governance body was formed they didn't want to join as a member. They just wanted to keep an eye on what was going on, which is fine, because we still kept in touch can them. We had a few members who joined up, we appointed NomiNet as the operating registry to do the registrations. We came up with a whole load of authentication and validation procedures, all that stuff happened, everything was set. The only thing is that there were no registrations or there were a lack of registrations. There were only a few members that joined up and this was the thing, is that at the time, everyone of thinking about ENUM for voice rather than ENUM for various different applications. Now, within [UKEK], the governance body, we did have ideas of well, what other things can be helped with ENUM technology? And we came up a whole load of different things. However, there was no one around to implement it and it seemed to me that even though people liked the idea of ENUM, no one wanted to spend their money. And because they didn't actually have any sort of ideas of whether it would be successful or not. We tried to get the we tried to talk to the NHS to talk about using ENUM technology for information services so you go into a hospital and there is a screens and things so there is a whole load of things that ENUM can be used for. We even went to talk to Ofcom about using ENUM for number portability and that's something that they have actually looking at right now. So from that side of things, things are happening but end user ENUM doesn't seem to be working and this is the thing, is that as just four of us as directors within the governing body, there is only so much that we can think about. But I went to various different meetings and spoke to other ENUM operators and everyone had the same idea but no one was actually telling me that yes, it's failed for them or it's not working for them. Everyone was like this is what we are doing, that's what we are doing, yes, we are still working on this, that or the other, however no one actually admitted that it wasn't actually working and this is the reason I asked for this panel session so that we can have an open discussion about this and maybe learn from each other. And move forward.
The thing that would please me the most is that all the operators get together and actually come up with various different solutions, rather than thinking about well, we are all competitors, actually think about how we can help each other and move forward on this.
NIALL O'REILLY: Nobody is rushing to join your club. Lino?
LINO SANTOS: I want to move forward. I want to make a question. Getting back to the first question you made to me about the model, I want to ask, in a scenario that we are focusing on applications and that applications are the driver for ENUM, I think we all agree on that, it's not only free calls, how do you see how do you compare the two scenarios that we talk initially about separating all the components of the service model and putting it all together within the operator if they are driver applications. Do you see an operator that owns this number, I ask for not me I subscribe an application and this application service provider goes to this operator and asks for an ENUM data with with my known number, okay? How do you see this working?
ROBERT SCHISCHKA: My experience once again is there is one good reasons for separating those roles and it is to make sure that every potential customer who has a phone number could get an ENUM number, an ENUM delegation if he really wants to so that you can avoid that if some carrier says we are not interested in it, and therefore we will not validate numbers and we will not take part in the whole thing, they would be able to block a whole number range from taking part in any kind of trial. So, there was one of the reasons for this role separation model.
The other alternative would be that the regulator forces every carrier to have a validation service. So that he must not participate in the ENUM thing but if some user asks him please, issue some kind of confirmation that I am really the number holder and I am entitled to this, every carrier would be forced to take this role. Then you could avoid certain circumstances. Otherwise, for instance, if the incumbent doesn't join your game a lot of your customers would be just impossible to use their numbers in this trial unless you once again go to a specific dedicated number range which I don't see really the biggest benefit at all.
LINO SANTOS: Sorry, what I'm trying to say is that the the user does not know does not have to subscribe to ENUM service. The user subscribes and application, only that, and says my phone and the application asks what is your phone number? And then the application service provider will go to a register and asked for the ENUM service. That will circumvent the problem of the geek you were talking about because users don't have to know about the technology. They don't have to know about the technology.
ROBERT SCHISCHKA: You mention you asked the user what is your phone number and then you have the step two of the validation, the user has to prove that this is really your phone number and here where the trouble starts. Either you give him the easiest way would be in it's a service not related to a telephone, give him a specific phone number, end of story, otherwise you have to validate and now my message is that the easiest way is a service provider validates his own customers. That's the cheapest process you can have and either you need this role segregation that, for instance, you can go to a lawyer who checks the public telephone book and some company register against the submission and says okay yes, obviously this number belongs to this company, or you have to get the carriers involved in this game and one of the steps to get involved is that you force a validation service, like you have it for a number portability, to be installed at each operator who holds a certain number block. That could be one way to do it. Otherwise, how do you prove that you really are the number holder? You will end up with send me three invoices of the last two months or something like this, and manual process checking whether these invoices are correct and to recheck it every six months and that just gives an extra cost which is far more expensive than the cost of a delegation itself. So the driving costs are the cost of validation of normal telephone numbers not belonging to the same registrar being the carrier. That's the most expensive part in the whole game.
PETER SZEGEDI: I apologise, I am not an expert but this model seems to me a similar to the authorisation and authentication infrastructure model, where you go to a service provider, where you have to identify yourself and there are IDPs, identity providers, so the application asks the identity provider who you are and then the identity provider provides all the information, all the information that needs for route authorisation to you so this model works in a federation area, probably you can apply the same model here as well.
DENESH BHABUTA: Lino
ROBERT SCHISCHKA: You are absolutely right but I think again it's not a technical problem, the whole idea of the identity providers is also a very nice idea but what's the reality? Everybody likes to be the identity provider and nobody likes to accept foreign identities, and if your main carriers do not play in your concert, game over. So that it's not about defining a technical protocol how those parties talk to each other. There are hundreds of them. It's can you force them to the table to join the club? And the only guy who can do this is probably your national regulator forcing them to do so. Or you need monetary incentives.
DENESH BHABUTA: I just wanted to say that in the UK when we did the validation document, it was exactly that, in that we got the application providers or the service providers to do the validation and that seemed to be the cheapest way of doing it.
NIALL O'REILLY: We are getting towards the time for the coffee break. So, we have two choices: Either we can steal the time from the coffee break or we can try to wrap things up at the moment, and I think I'll aim for wrapping things up unless people disagree so much with what I am about about to say that we get a whole new discussion and we eat up the coffee break.
It seems to me that although there are parallels between the problems that ENUM is the problems that are facing people who might want to offer applications that depended on ENUM and, for example, other federative models, the motivation is the problem. Whereas I am thinking that Peter is thinking of [] Eddie Rome is a prime example of how federation works, and the nice thing there is that universities like to allow their academic staff to travel to other universities, it's part of the way they do their job, and they need to play cooperatively with each other, so the identity provider responsibility comes naturally out of the motivation of making the staff mobile, and that's not the case in the telephone number world. So, we don't really have an effective parallel there.
If we don't have applications or at least, the other parallel that offers itself is the parallel of social networking where, typically, the identifier is the e mail address and the validation is done by sending back to the person who claims to have this e mail address a request to confirm and that just works, because the e mail infrastructure is already in there and the Internet can base other services on top of it. And there comes then a rather stark choice: Either somebody comes up very quickly with something that is compellingly based on telephone numbers, or we decide that, well, telephone numbers aren't going to work and we can stop we can stop putting effort into this ENUM thing.
In the meantime, I think it's still important for countries that have put the infrastructure in place, even if it's on hold like in Sweden or in France or in a few other countries, to leave the infrastructure there for a time rather than start dismantling it immediately, and I wonder what the panelists think about how long that interval should be before those countries should say, well, it's enough time already, we can stop, or we definitely have something useful to do here and we should build it on top of this technology?
DENESH BHABUTA: Would it be possible for the ENUM Working Group to contact, as a collective, contact all the ENUM operators and say, we need to have some joined up thinking, give it a few months, maybe give it until the next RIPE Meeting to decide the answer to that question?
NIALL O'REILLY: Sounds like you are volunteering for an action item, Denesh...
We could add a few more helpers, of course, but, you know, somebody has to do that work and it's really best not left to the co chairs because that creates a bottleneck. So...
DENESH BHABUTA: Okay, it seems like I have volunteered. Fine.
NIALL O'REILLY: You can also volunteer to press gang a few friends to help you with that. It sounds like a task force activity within the Working Group.
PETER SZEGEDI: I can help you with with this.
NIALL O'REILLY: Okay. Two is already a good start.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: I was just about to say we have three operators sitting at that very table already, for the respective country codes are in ENUM, we have Peter with nrenum.net and there is also the ENUM federation, which is, as much as I see it, a bit dormant these days, but they are nonetheless, can be poked to have further outreach to at least its members. So, I guess that can be pulled together from my point of view.
NIALL O'REILLY: How shall we call the action item? Follow up to the panel discussion, or brainstorming among ENUM operators?
DENESH BHABUTA: That's the one.
NIALL O'REILLY: Okay. Then I think I'd like to wrap it up there and hand back the microphone to Carsten to polish off the last couple of agenda items since he is formally chairing the overall session. Before I do that, I'd like to thank all the panelists for their interesting interventions that's a very French word their interesting comments and questions, and I hope that the action item will lead somewhere fruitful. Thank you all very much.
(Applause)
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Thank you, Niall, for that. Let's get through the last 15 points on the agenda. I guess the short news is, we are not going to have this presented here during the session. Niall has sent out his slides about the ENUM data .org website to the list earlier today so anybody who would have an interest, I hope everybody here in the room should have an interest in it, can just go to the list and see the presentation on the list as well as it is linked from the website here.
Discussion on Plenary presentations: As we haven't had any Plenary presentation, we are not going to have any discussions on or not happened Plenary presentation, but I see Niall O'Reilly at the mike.
NIALL O'REILLY: I am waiting for item Z.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Is there any need for interaction with other Working Groups? I don't see any. Maybe you just want to raise one point or the other? No, I don't see this. Any other business that has not yet been dealt with? I don't see any hands raised, either, for this one, which brings me to agenda item Z, which is the close, and Niall is waiting for to give some comments.
NIALL O'REILLY: Perhaps it should have been item Y, actually. I just want to record that we are planning to move the ENUM data .org website from the kind hosting that's been provided by Kim Davies for a number of years to hosting by the RIPE NCC, and that will be one of the action items that comes up under Z, and I think that will be 63.2, and 63.1 is the one that Denesh and Peter have taken on themselves to do the follow up from the panel discussion. I think that's all the action items we have.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Yes. Which yeah, then brings me to an end, maybe we would like to give a round of applause to all of the panelists once more as well as to the presenters and also to the scribes and the Jabber work, to Alex and Mirijam, as well as to our the stenographer.
STENOGRAPHER: Thanks.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: As well as to in general, to the RIPE NCC for providing all these technical services here and thank you very much.
(Applause)
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