ENUM Generating Increasing Interest

The lecture at the IP Telephony Workshop concluded with a heated debate including many questions; ENUM experience from the Czech Republic presented at the ENUM Day in Holland

Prague, Czech Republic, 22 November 2007 – The Prague IP Telephony Workshop hosted a presentation on Tuesday 20 November dedicated to the ENUM technology, showing – as apparent from the number of questions and the subsequent lively debate – that the awareness about this revolutionary system rises and there is increasing interest in ENUM among professionals as well as the general public.

Pavel Tůma, ENUM project manager at CZ.NIC, administrator of the CZ national domain, presented to more than 60 listeners who came to learn about news in the product/service offerings in the IP telephony sector, discover practical benefits of the ENUM technology and explore its implementation options as well as its future impact on the telephone service provider market development.

Although the ENUM technology has been deployed only in a few countries of the world so far, it is now quite certain that it is changing the communication market. Pavel Tůma, ENUM project manager at CZ.NIC, says: “The existing situation in the telecommunications industry is similar to that of the Internet connectivity market several year ago. It has not been long since we had to pay for the data transferred whereas now we pay a flat rate for the network connection. Minute fees for phone calls will also be replaced with flat rates covering a “telephone” network connection. ENUM is one of the steps on the way to this concept.”

Further in his presentation Pavel Tůma suggested the course the telecommunications market development could follow. With the dropping number of fixed lines in use and the constant fall of call costs, it makes no sense for telecommunication service providers to settle with the existing source of call-generated income. Instead they will have to find new services and business models to attract their clients.

Pavel Tůma's presentation is – along with other lectures – available at www.iptw.cz.

Czech Representative at the First Dutch ENUM Day
Pavel Tůma presented his experience with ENUM also at the first Dutch ENUM Day, taking place on 7 November in Amsterdam. Since they have only just started deploying this technology in the Netherlands, Pavel Tůma focused his presentation mainly on the system deployment process, further tackling the issue of ENUM information spreading and pointing out the main challenges bound to the propagation of the technology in the Czech Republic.

ENUM NL, administrator of the Dutch national prefix +31, is planning to launch the system at the beginning of 2008. To support this launch, they have organized a series of lectures and workshops for over 50 entities from the sector of telecommunication service providers, registrars, Internet connection providers, and the local Internet community. Foreign participants focused in their presentations both on their experience from successful implementations of the ENUM technology in other countries and on specific case studies from the practice, used to present the way ENUM is utilized.

ENUM in the Czech Republic

• November 2007 Over 3000 ENUM domains and 557,600 phone numbers registered (this number positions the Czech Republic among the largest ENUM domain registries in the world)
  
  
• January 2007 Full business operation launched
  
• September 2006 Official testing operation launched; 2,000 domains registered
  
• April 2006 New ENUM registration system deployed
  
• April 2006 ENUM deployment agreed by the government
  
• 2003 – 2006 Non-official testing operation launched (manual, fee >100 EUR); 75 domains registered
  
• 2003 The domain 0.2.4.e164.arpa established on the basis of agreement of the Ministry of Informatics of the Czech Republic
  

ENUM domains are registered by 17 registrars. ENUM domains are supported in the networks of the following telecommunication operators: IPEX, a. s., CL-NET, s. r. o., and NETWAY.CZ, s. r. o. There are few more operators getting ready to support ENUM-based calls.
Users of the ENUM system in Europe now include United Kingdom, Austria, Germany, Poland, Finland, Romania and Ireland while testing operation is in progress in several additional countries. National ENUM domains are delegated in virtually all European countries. All information on the ENUm domain is available at enum.nic.cz.