Carriers collaborate to develop new numbering technology

Service providers including AT&T, GoDaddy.com, MCI, SBC Laboratories, Sprint, Verizon and others have formed a new organization to build the public infrastructure that will develop, support and promote ENUM-based technologies for the convergence of Internet and telecom numbering plans.

The new organization, the Country Code 1 ENUM Limited Liability Company (CC1 ENUM LLC), will work toward the development of ENUM technology with countries in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), which includes the United States, Canada and the Caribbean nations.

ENUM allows Internet users and traditional telephony users to maximize the use of both the public Internet and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) by associating telephone numbers with Internet domain names. A common ENUM system becomes more necessary as applications like voice-over-IP (VoIP) become more widely adopted.

The founding companies are seeking to build a commercial implementation consistent with open standards of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the International Telecommunication Union upon which ENUM is based. The new company will help to implement a single, public ENUM system for those nations within the NANP that choose to participate. Members will select a vendor to take the initial steps toward creating an infrastructure that would enable the countries within the NANP to establish their own national ENUM implementations.

Country Code 1 ENUM LLC will manage the public infrastructure that translates traditional telephone numbers into Internet domain names.