The definition and purpose of telephone numbers confronted...

The definition and purpose of telephone numbers confronted FCC and industry engineers at a numbering testbed workshop Tuesday. “The whole point is to explore as many reasonable solutions as possible” to learn what works well, said FCC Chief Technologist Henning Schulzrinne. Attendees considered what purpose telephone numbers should be used for “besides supporting real-time communications”; whether it’s possible to design a “fully-distributed ‘meshed’ system that does not rely on a master database” of number assignments; and how caching might be built into the architecture to “facilitate robustness.” Any new system has to do a much better job of presenting information about the entity to nontechnical users, Schulzrinne told the several dozen participants. It needs to be able to address consumer fraud, as well as more traditional, “not outright criminal, things that people do,” such as nuisance calls, he said. The group discussed how best to route numbers in an IP-based world, and some suggested a potential Domain Name System-like approach. “What makes a phone number unique” is that it’s a global identifier not associated with a specific provider of services, associated on a long-term basis with a person, organization or service; and -- compared with domain names -- it’s “reasonably international” in terms of usability, Schulzrinne said. It’s also usable outside the local domain, unlike, for instance, a Facebook ID, he said. As for “details” such as how many digits phone numbers contain, or whether they're assigned by one entity or another? “I'm agnostic on that,” Schulzrinne said.