Progress achieved in ‘ENUM’ proposal

GENEVA – The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has achieved further progress in advancing work to enable the commercial implementation of an Internet telephone number mapping protocol, better known as ENUM.

Study Group 2 of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector is currently hammering out the principles and procedures for the administration of ENUM as well as the framework that will set out the role of the ITU.

Under the proposed ENUM protocol and subject to national authorities and end-user approval, it will be possible to use a single number to access many types of terminals and services – phone, fax, e-mail, pager, mobile phones, STP telephony address, a website or other resources that can be described by an Internet addressing scheme – at home, at work or while roaming.

"The workplan agreed by Study Group 2 responds to requests from industry and Internet standardization groups, while satisfying government regulatory concerns," said Roy Blane, chairman of Study Group 2.

"We now have an agreed path forward that will allow, when the work is completed, an orderly and secure way for many new services to be provided, for example, the ability to call a voice-enabled IP terminal from a conventional telephone. This is a clear example of convergence, and the ITU is playing a major role in making it possible," Blane added.

Developed in cooperation with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), ENUM proposes to make available seamless access among the fast-growing number of communication devices that use different types of networks (circuit-switched and packet-switched, including IP) and different numbers and addresses by mapping a single number to these addresses through the Internet Domain Name System (DNS).