ENUM Revisited

Over at Ars Technica Rudolf van der Berg has a nice story called, “ENUM: Dragging telephone numbers into the Internet Age.” The story includes a some nice background on the history of phone numbers and the possibilities presented by ENUM.

To get a little more into ENUM you need to go back in time just a bit. IT Conversations offers a podcast version of an Etel 2007 presentation by John Todd about ENUM. The slides from John’s presentation are also available.

John is one of the founders of the FreeNum Project. FreeNum and the related idea of ITAD Subscriber Numbers (ISN) provides a handy mechanism for dialing non-numeric things like SIP URI via a phone that has a traditional purely numeric keypad. It’s a strategy for transition from where we are now to where we want to be in the future.

Back in 2007 John was CTO of TalkPlus. These days he spends his time as the Open Source Community Director at Digium. You can also find him on Twitter.

About that same time there was a VoIP Users Conference call about ENUM and E.164. You can find that podcast here.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing then I also recommend listening to the podcast of the VoIP Users Conference call of Jan 10, 2010 where we had Voxbone as a guest, discussing their INUM service.

If you get through all of that and still crave more then you are, like many VUC regulars, an ILECs worst nightmare. Welcome to the club.