ENUM was going to change telephone routing. No longer would you need to pay a carrier to take your calls across the PSTN, but rather through the use of DNS your handset would look up a destination and route in a peer to peer fashion.
Number porting would just be a matter of updating NAPTR records, almost all calls would be free as there’s no way/need to charge and media would flow directly from the calling party to the called party.
In 2005 ACMA became the Tier 1 provider from RIPE for the ENUM zone 4.6.e164.arpa
A trial was run and Tier 2 providers were sought to administer the system and to verify ownership of services before adding NAPTR records for individual services and referral records for ranges / delegation.
In 2007 the trial ended with only two CSPs having signed up and a half a dozen test calls made between them.
Now, over a decade later as we prepare for the ISDN switch off, NBN is almost finished rolling out, the Comms Alliance porting specs remain as rigid as ever, it might be time to look again at ENUM in Australia…
At the end of the day, the MNOs are not great fans of number portability – as the flow of subscribers invariably will transition from the larger operators to the newer smaller (and more competitive) players. As such, they are hardly likely to want to implement a system which makes porting numbers much easier for the end users…
Too true. Good read thank you.