Number is Up for U.S. Address Policy in IP Era, Technologists Say

U.S. regulators need an “explosion” of change to get away from “ludicrous” numbering processes based on “LATAs and trunk groups” that “stifle innovation,” including in E-911, simply so “incumbents maintain a stranglehold on the communications address space,” said Tom Kershaw, VeriSign’s vice president for next generation services. His comments went beyond those of NeuStar Director Richard Shockey, who suggested the FCC could use a “push” in a new direction.

Kershaw added that he has an “absolute paralyzing fear” of policymakers fouling up the matter. He bemoaned technology mandates and moves toward basing universal service funding on numbers rather than “connectivity.” Patrick Halley, government affairs director of the National Emergency Number Association, said there’s no “getting around there will be winners and losers based on who knows their way around” Washington.

Verifying the source of a communication is the biggest challenge for those in numbering, Shockey said. “A very core issue for next generation networks” is “how do we know where the call came from?” he said. Without circuits, the historically solid “transitive trust” between those who handle messages “may not be there anymore,” Shockey said. Public key infrastructure certificates have been proposed as the solution, but they're “difficult to implement in the long run,” he said. The fundamental problem is whether identity should be handled in the applications, transport or IP level, Shockey said.

Nailing down the identities of message sources creates major privacy problems, Shockey said. He said “there’s a fair amount of legitimacy” to former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy’s advice on considering privacy infringement: “Get over it.” Shockey added that “the 800-pound gorilla in the room fundamentally is CALEA and some of the three-letter friends” in Washington, alluding to the FBI and intelligence agencies.

ENUM, endorsed by CableLabs and the GSM Association, “has sort of won the argument” about “how carrier networks translate numbers into something useful,” Shockey said. And of three models “that have sort of bedeviled the industry,” private-infrastructure ENUM has superseded carrier and public versions, he said.

Phone numbers are “going to stay here for a while,” though “how they're used may change,” Moresco said. Numbers are trusted for functions such as emergency services, and mobile applications are keyed to them, he said. But they're going through “decoupling” from conventional limitations on location, services and user information, Moresco said. “Assumptions that are valid today may not be valid tomorrow.”

The bright line between landline and mobile numbers is “being blurred,” and mobile virtual network operators “may not be the carrier of record” for the numbers they distribute, Moresco said. This increases the work needed to ensure any incoming communication “is a trusted session you should let into your network,” he said.

“Call takers are scared to death about unvalidated crap coming into the call centers,” NENA’s Halley said of 911 dispatchers. Laws and technology prevent the 911 system from accepting anything but voice calls, but NENA is preparing for a wider variety of communications, he said.

NENA i2 is a “near-term effort” to automate delivery information using a location information server database instead of phone numbers, Moresco said. The follow-up i3 would be more powerful, he said. An Emergency Services Provider Network would bridge public service answer points and the public switched network, Moresco said. But “numbers will continue to be used elsewhere in the 911 system,” he said. Numbering blocks may be replaced by more efficient ways to manage numbers, Moresco said.

“A substantial part of NGN [next-generation network] traffic may use a quote-unquote global database” of ENUM entries, Moresco said. But this would be made up of databases from multiple ENUM federations, not a single “big ENUM database in the sky,” he said.

Each user will have “many, many, many” communications addresses, Kershaw said. Many people have multiple e-mail addresses, he said, and instead of getting rid of identifiers they just stop using them. The number of widely-used communications technologies, such as social media and multiplayer gaming, keeps growing, Kershaw said. “How do you mesh all of those things into a person?”

But Kershaw called nonissues many of the questions raised by others. “We'll solve” E-911 complications “through RFID,” he said. “We'll put chips in everyone,” or on them. And “ENUM kills” local number portability allowing users to change how they're contacted by changing domain names, Kershaw said. And IPv6 is “totally irrelevant” to numbering,” he said.

Verification of communications may not be as important as it’s made out to be, Kershaw said. “Do I really need to be authenticated?” he asked. “I'm not 100 percent sure” the communications network needs to protect users from being deceived by each other, he said.

The big problems are “synchronization and accuracy” from the distributed databases of user information that carriers favor maintaining, Kershaw said. That requires smart protocols, he said. Kershaw said distributed databases “don’t work” and he favors a centralized one.