My father has self-scribbled at least a dozen telephone diaries over the last few years, entering and updating numbers. When he travels he carries with him the necessary diaries. I have not been successful in persuading him to use electronic directories or the available directory application on mobile handsets. He is naturally good at remembering phone numbers. I am on the other hand quite the opposite. I only remember the phone numbers of my office and home. For me, and for several people around the world, an irreversible change has taken place. We click a name. We don’t punch in the numbers.
This is one of the reasons why minutes are increasingly migrating away from landlines to mobiles. This is also one of the reasons why providers of mirror numbers are gaining some traction. Jaxtr just announced that it signed up 5 million subscribers. The fact that people click names rather than remembering numbers means that your contacts could have any phone number. You do not care what phone number sits behind a contact name.
Just like you do not need to know the IP address of iLocus website, you can also make the phone numbers irrelevant by promoting the use of usernames perhaps. The difference however between a domain name and a username is that a domain name can be unique. Usernames are not unique. You could have the same usernames across Google mail and Hotmail for instance. Making phone-mapped (and later just SIP-address-mapped) unique usernames could create lots of new dynamics. Imagine if you could dial from Skype (or from Gizmo or from an IVR assisted VoBB /PSTN phone) the name of a business like iLocus and you get connected to our office phone number (or a number we designate against the username iLocus). Such a set up could be beneficial for businesses. That is just one area of impact.
The question is what would be the DNS equivalent of globally unique VoIP usernames that all VoIP and non-VoIP service providers connect to in order to route the calls. The ENUM technology is mandated to accomplish a different thing. It converts unique PSTN numbers into unique IP addressing scheme. It does not map unique usernames to some IP addressing scheme. If we have such a capability within ENUM servers, they could be ideal is hosting DNS type services for providers looking to offer dial-by-username telephony services.
I suspect peering exchanges might be working on such services, especially Neustar. Offering peering/clearinghouse services to companies like Skype and Gizmo - and all those who effectively offer dial-by-username services – would be an obvious starting point.
There are several benefits and implications of dialling by username, especially in an IP world where security of networks is a concern. VoIP peering in general brings dramatic changes to traditional interconnection models. But at the same time it brings with it several security challenges as well. That reminds me that we will be discussing VoIP peering related issues in our forthcoming webinar focussed on Asia Pacific service provider community. We welcome you to join us on Wednesday morning (Tuesday night US Pacific Time).
With dial by globally-unique-username, you could not only enhance peering services, you could also have register.com type companies sell vanity usernames to people (just like they sell domain names) and perhaps share the revenue per username with the peering exchange. The combination of the registrar, the peering exchange (DNS equivalent), and the service provider (hosting provider equivalent) will permanently push the voice application into the web realm. That makes the transition to IP easier for telcos whereby they become hosting provider of your username.