Geoff Hudston wrote an article for ISP Column on ENUM called “Lord of the Numbers“, one of the best introduction to ENUM I have seen so far.
Incidently, Geoff said this in his article:
Interestingly enough a close inspection of your local table of international dialing codes and a close inspection of the E.164 registry will reveal that there’s at least one location that is listed as an international dialling code, yet has no matching entry in the E.164 registry. Does this entity get an ENUM delegation in the same way that it already has a delegated top level DNS country code domain? Or does its absence in the E.164 registry imply an absence in the ENUM space as well?
I am not sure why he made this sound so crytic but perhaps this involves Taiwan. You see, Taiwan international dialing code is +886 which (not) surprisingly is not in the E.164 registry (+886 is marked “reserved”). This works okay in the past since IDD interconnection are bilteral agreements between telcos. If Taiwan telcos can convience all other telcos to route +886 calls to them, it works whether it is in the E.164 registry or not.
On the other hand, because e164.arpa ENUM delegation from RIPE requires an official E.164 registry assignment. Since Taiwan never got +886 officially, this means Taiwan couldn’t get +886 for ENUM either…
Solution? I have some ideas but this would be an interesting discussion topic for for theENUM BoF I am organizing.
(via John Patrick. Read Patrick article on The Ultimate Internet while you are there.)
