Dipping for dollars

There's revenue in those phone number and address databases — if service providers know how to go in there and claim it.

That's the story from two vendors providing new solutions that are taking some of the most basic of registries — DNS for Internet domains and eNum for IP-based call and content delivery — and helping carriers wring new service revenues from them.

Nominum, which makes the most widely used commercial DNS database solution, recently added new capabilities to its core platform that will enable service providers to aggregate and in real-time process billions of records about Internet domains, including whether they are in some way malicious.

With that information, service providers can deliver better security services, such as anti-virus or anti-phishing measures, as well as content-based services such as parental controls. While deep packet inspection (DPI) boxes can analyze IP traffic in real-time, analyzing domains rather than individual packets is a lower-impact, lower-cost option.

“Inspecting all traffic from all threats is impractical and cost-prohibitive,” said Gopala Tumuluri, vice president of marketing for Nominum, noting that more aggressive DNS segregation could work well in tandem with DPI.

Taking a similar tack of dipping into databases for dollars is Telcordia. It has begun to expand its Service Interconnection Registry service — which at its core includes eNum database look-up capabilities — to be not just about phone number interconnection but broadening support for an array of mobile services.

Enabling this strategy is the fact that while the eNum protocol can be used to interconnect voice-over-IP calls, its addressing schemes also serve as the underpinning for a variety of mobile services, allowing carriers to map short message service and multimedia messaging service messages as well as ringtone and wallpaper delivery to mobile devices. Telcordia's goal is to bring data from more carriers into its centralized eNum service, expanding it to include “more robust, meaningful and detailed” information about users and devices — including detailed phone profiles, user location and more, said Tom Kershaw, general manager of interconnection solutions for Telcordia. This can be used by service providers, as well as third-party partners, to deliver new revenue-producing mobile services.

DATABASE 101

DNS

Domain name service (DNS) databases route user IP requests to the proper domains, i.e. Web sites. By better screening domain requests in real time out on the network, service providers can offer anti-malware services, parental controls and content filtering.

eNum

Designed to support VoIP number peering, the eNum protocol also links mobile services such as SMS and ringtone delivery to specific devices. By adding more data to eNum databases, such as detailed device profiles or user location info, operators can build new mobile services.