ENUM: The Collision of Telephony and DNS Policy

TL;DR

ENUM integrates telephone numbers with DNS to unify contact information across communication platforms, representing a convergence of telephony and Internet technologies.

Contribution

This paper discusses the development and implications of ENUM as an innovative DNS-based system linking telephone numbers with Internet contact data.

Findings

ENUM enables retrieval of diverse contact info via DNS queries.

It bridges telephony and Internet communication systems.

ENUM's adoption impacts policy and technical standards.

Abstract

ENUM marks either the convergence or collision of the public telephone network with the Internet. ENUM is an innovation in the domain name system (DNS). It starts with numerical domain names that are used to query DNS name servers. The servers respond with address information found in DNS records. This can be telephone numbers, email addresses, fax numbers, SIP addresses, or other information. The concept is to use a single number in order to obtain a plethora of contact information. By convention, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ENUM Working Group determined that an ENUM number would be the same numerical string as a telephone number. In addition, the assignee of an ENUM number would be the assignee of that telephone number. But ENUM could work with any numerical string or, in fact, any domain name. The IETF is already working on using E.212 numbers with ENUM. [Abridged]