Phone Numbers Instead of URLs?

December writes "This story says Australian company Nascomms claims to be the first in the world to go online with numeric addressing [CT:TCP/IP uses numbers too, just not ones with area code ;)], in which telephone numbers are used in replace of the ubiquitous dot-com address. Interesting idea, but in the business case, I could much more easily guess www.toyota.com then figuring out their phone number."

Comments

I can see it now... (screen goes wavy)

[Snowfox]

Wife: Hon? It's still busy...

Husband: *snicker* Keeeeep tryin'. Call again.

Wife: (dialing aloud) 1-2-7, 0, 0, 1... damn! Busy!

Husband: Dear, I gave you the number earlier. You're the one who wanted to eat at Chez Expensif. Why didn't you make reservations?

Wife: I've been dialing ALL DAY!!!

IETF have already done this

[M100]

See RFC2916 This describes how to map E.164 numbers (telephone numbers) in the DNS. The primary purpose is so that you can email your phone (for example), but there is nothing to stop this system mapping a phone number to a WWW page. Unfortunately this RFC uses the existing reverse-DNS .arpa domain so the phone numbers are written BACKWARDS! Not very friendly.

What a great idea!

[tycage]

Using number to identify machines! Maybe a sequence of 12 numbers, grouped into sets of three. Too bad no one has ever thought of this!

Seriously, wouldn't the easiest way to accomplish this be to just turn off DNS

--Ty

Incredulous?

[devnullkac]

"We expect that figure to grow incredulously over the next few months," Nacomms general manager Siobhan Dooley told ZDNet.

I, for one, am certainly incredulous about the growth prospects.