John Todd wrote:
TRIP (RFC 3219) is the answer, but I'm the only one pounding that drum, it seems. If anyone here on the list has $100,000 to put together a real programming effort towards getting that implemented, y'all let me know. The longer this waits, the more lame and broken become the solutions offered. <sigh>
One small oversight in your thinking, something like TRIP will only benefit large telcos and VOIP providers with interconnects, I don't see this flowing down to a tangible benefit to the average person, where as something like enum.164 is.
TRIP is based on BGP and BGP already does most of the IP routing smarts TRIP is supposed to be beneficial for, however that $100k would be better spent on improving the smarts in the call routing software rather then turning things back into a hub and spoke model, p2p is way more efficient if it can be utilised to it's full potential.
At this stage the only potential method to prevent VOIP spam is something like SPF records, which would only end up duplicate enum. It's a lot harder to get phone numbers then IP addresses, so this would overcome people's concerns about dynamically allocated IPs, phone numbers aren't.
-- Best regards, Duane
I strongly disagree with your summary that TRIP doesn't help the smaller user. In fact, the reason I'm so strongly an advocate of some type of TRIP development is that it removes the barriers for small entities in the pursuit of better call rates for TDM offload and VoIP interconnection. Comparative routing data should not be the sole domain of huge telephony firms.
One example...
Currently, I see quite a few people here trying to get good rates to various international destinations (regardless of their nation of origin.) Wouldn't it be nice to have a protocol that allowed the home or small business user to have COMPETING long distance carriers on a per-call basis? When one of them runs a sale, your voice traffic could (according to your rules) shift over to the least expensive/best sounding/whatever carrier that you'd chosen. Just get a TRIP feed from three or four carriers, and away you go. It all would happen automatically, and you could preference or de-preference certain metrics as you went along but the carriers will be sending you their most up-to-date routing information for PSTN handoff destinations. Wouldn't it be great if your Asterisk server had that ability? This is just one use and benefit case of TRIP; there are many others.
If you say that ENUM is going to solve that problem by offering pointers for every phone prefix in the world in the next 5 years, or even 33% of them, I would suggest that is a rather optimistic outlook. ENUM cannot have competing answers to the same question; it MUST have a single answer, no matter how many private ENUM servers you put in the path (otherwise, you're just redesigning TRIP.) TDM offload in between VoIP networks is here to stay; we just need a protocol that allows inter-system route exchange for those of us lucky enough to be able to take advantage of it today, not sometime in the far off future. Yes, it will also help large carriers as well for their exchange of route information, but it's not limited to their use.
TRIP is like BGP in it's design, but extremely different in it's implementation. It layers on top of IP, so arguments comparing BGP to TRIP with terms like "hub and spoke" are invalid. Destination information does not (necessarily) follow any of the path of the lower layers of the routing protocol. Additionally, I am unclear on how you believe that TRIP is involved in "IP routing smarts." The two are not linked in any way. Can you clarify?
I am uncertain to what your final comments about spam refer. Neither ENUM nor TRIP address issues of call validation in a realistic manner; any SPF-like methods for verifying origination work equally well with either reference scheme. Remember that ENUM is a stopgap, and we should do all we can to move away from numbers as an addressing scheme for VoIP (or any protocol) delivery. My SIP phone address is "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" but the only reason most people can't use that is because they are crippled by phones with numeric keypads. ENUM is the in-between method to map numbers to more flexible addressing until we have smarter phones on our desks and we can use the more flexible addressing methods to "dial" the other party.
As I've said, I am a firm believer in ENUM as a "second-generation" VoIP routing method, but I'm just as firm a believer (due to very hard-won experience in the PBX and carrier markets) that it is insufficient at this time to make any difference at all in anything other than the most theoretical environments, or environments that have been jury-rigged to use ENUM because there was nothing better available.
JT
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