techblog 

To start off, if you don’t know much about ENUM then read our brief introduction on our website.

ENUM as a technology is all about telephone numbers, but just how long will telephone numbers actually last and so how long will ENUM be with us?

Surprisingly it turns out that for VoIP we could do away with telephone number immediately. By using SRV records it is possible to have fully alphanumeric VoIP addresses that look just like email addresses. However there are some very big problems with this:

Dialling names not numbers

Most devices capable of dialling do not support dialling a name instead of a number. Obviously for VoIP phones and clients this is an omission that could be corrected just by greater awareness amongst developers. The really interesting bit though is mobile phones. The technical platform that mobile phones work on could support name dialling with limited changes, so they might do it one day.

Social exclusion

One of the big themes in the ongoing IGF is access to the Internet. Switching to alphanumeric addresses for VoIP could make the problems of exclusion much wider. Technologies will probably be developed to bridge the gap, but the problem will still be there.

In conclusion I think that telephone numbers, and ENUM by implication, will phase out over perhaps ten or twenty years, whilst we are weaned from our addiction to telephone numbers. But then given that Nominet is only ten years old and so much has happened in that time, I don’t think that makes ENUM any less worthwhile.