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Mapping Phones To IP Addresses
There's an interesting article currently running about the joys of mapping phone numbers to IP addresses, and what that means. Also talks about LDAP directory implementation and other potential fun interactions. (CT: Does anyone
else think it's horribly stupid to map numbers onto names which map
onto other numbers? Dumb da dumb dumb).
Shit!!! Damned DHCP Server changed my phone number again!!!!
And 10.0.0.1 my call can not be completed as dialed!!!!!
But when I dial *.*.*.255 it's a party line!!!!
You've hit on the #1 problem with VoIP phones, the one most /.ers never seem to understand. Phone numbers!
/. ran an article last week about the Philippines charging for terminating VoIP calls, not one post seemed to show a clue as to why this rule came about. ObRant:I miss the old days when a large fraction of the /. posters were highly clued individuals :-)
There are two large scale communication systems in the world today, the phone system, and the internet. The phone system is still a magnitude larger than the internet.
Now the internet supports telephony, and there was even a recent discussion about IP dialtone. But where do you get your phone numbers? Just use IP addresses or URLs? How do you tie the two systems together, since the archaic telephone system can only address a string of numbers? IP addresses with the * key in place of a dot? No, you have to go to the lowest common denominator, phone numbers.
As people have noticed with all the recent press on telephone renumbering plans, the telephone world is growing by leaps and bounds as well. But unlike IPv4, which is hard coded to a 2^32 limit, the telephone system can expand forever by adding another digit to form new city codes and area codes. In every country, there is someone overseeing the assignment of blocks of telephone numbers, and in progressive countries, trying to ensure the established operator plays fairly with the new competition and everyone routes to everyone else's calls. Now, ISPs are being thrown into the mix.
What happens when your techo-peasant mother wants to call you on your spiffy new IP telephone? She'll dial your telephone number, and somewhere in between her analog POTS line and your IP phone, there must be a transition gateway. Either the phone company or an ISP will run it, and somehow they will bill for the privilege.
Nokia, Cisco, Lucent, Alcatel, Ericson, and hundreds of dotcom startups, all have some kind of SS7/IMT to VoIP gateway products on offer. I've set some up, they all require a solid, but schizophrenic, understanding of both worlds. If you thought there was a philisophical gap between Linux and Micro~1.oft, just try bridging the voice and data worlds.
The hardest part is in obtaining a block of working phone numbers for each area, and getting a sympathetic telco to route calls. The next hardest part is in sorting out the billing. Who pays for terminating calls in each direction, and what happens when one system carries a toll call for the other. When
The obvious economic advantage lies in using IP to transport voice calls. Either simply, such as IP to IP calls which bypass local tolls, or in companies using part of their internet bandwidth to pass call to remote offices or partners on the internet.
Career tip: Broadband companies are all desperately trying to create IP dialtone offerings, to help cut out the local telco monopoly. Learn VoIP, SS7, media gateway controllers, E.164 and SIP, and make a fortune selling your knowledge to cable and DSL companies.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I mean, just think, the next time some 313370 nd00d script kiddie tries to hack a machine you own [1], you could call up his mamma and tell her to spank them 'till their ass fell off. DoS = DuS (Dial Up Spanking)
side note: friend of mine put a sound card in his openbsd firewall (sits in front of several semi-popular local websites), and hooked up ipmon's output to a perl script that looked for things that should be handled proactively (it also logged to syslog). Everytime a pattern occured that was probably a script kiddie, he had the script play a sound sample (system("/usr/bin/mpg123","./thunk.mp3") ) of a ripe melon hitting a board. The sound of script kiddies thunking into a wall was ... gratifying.
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While it's not the scale of the discussion it's certainly out there & working.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Having a transition system is critical in deploying a new technology or migrating people to it.
Agreed completely.
Even beyond transitional needs, it also satisfies a more long term need. I may know a friend's name and phone number, and what domains he has. However, Which IP address amongst the several under his control will have a VoIP daemon running on it? Probably the one that he mapped to his phone number. What if his IP is dynamic? Unlike names, phone numbers are unique identifiers of a place (where the phone is). It's as good as any unique ID and will probably be needed even after all phones are updated to VoIP (probably about five minutes before the heat death of the universe). IPv6 addresses could be used as well as long as dynamic addressing is strictly prohibited and the current requirement that the node address be globally unique (which may be in conflict with privacy needs).
At some point, people may need to password protect their VoIP phones as well. It's bad enough that telemarketers can buy your phone number so they can abuse it while you are trying to enjoy dinner, but imagine getting a telemarketer call about the banner ad that just popped up on your browser.People may prefer using an alternate number that cannot be guessed based on your IP address (like current phone numbers) and require verification that the connection to the daemon was referred to the IP address by a phone number lookup (some sort of auth token).
From my K5 article from some time ago, Australian company Nascomms has patents pending on technology to convert phone numbers into URLs. They've redesigned their page, but at one stage they were claiming to have invented numeric Internet addresses.
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I used to work for a company that is now part of Nokia. It had that very voice over ip product 2 years ago. Use any analog phone on your data network. see zd net
Wow.. won't this make spamming people that much easier? Thanks for the email address, I'll just do an LDAP lookup and give you a call, see if you want to buy random good/service. What? I can use the Internet to make those telephone calls and all I have to pay for is bandwidth? It's just like email!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Hm...
From what I read in the article, the project wasn't useful just because it linked a phone number, but because it made that information accessible to both sides of the network.
As a standalone database, this wouldn't be much more than a curiosity, or good practice in huge distributed systems. It's when it's linked to other 'bridging' services that it becomes incrediby useful.
And, honestly, I don't see those bridging services getting as much attention as they could.
"If they send someone here, I'll arrange the usual 'accident.'" -- Alice, "Dilbert"
I'm not sure if I understand the need for this system.
As suggested by other above, the most beneficial use of the system would be transition. There will come a time in the future when people won't want to have two systems for receiving phone calls, but we wont all switch over to IP at the same time.
Smooth transition should also help the large telcos who will eventually see a stop in their subscriber growth followed by a steady death march downward as more and more people move to communicating by alternatives to conventional telephone service. (Probably just a dream, but a nightmare without someway to pad the fall if it happens.)
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Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I doubt any end user will see a DNS name when they are trying to dial a number - the phone (or VoIP enabled app) will just let them dial a number, and the DNS lookups happen behind the scenes.
Check out the Session Initiation Protocol. Its the competing protocol against H.323 (blah). It supports mapping names to phone numbers, phone numbers to names, phone numbers to webpages, etc.
The reason there's such a push for IPv6 is simplification of routing tables. Under the current system, 128.59.34.22 could be on one continent and 128.59.35.22 could be on another. IPv6 is much more hierarchical.
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You first fallacy was thinking that Britney would have any interest whatsoever in your phone number. The second was in your even uttering her name.
strangely reminiscent of this.
There's probably going to be more and more effet put into tying together the Internet and the PSTN. I wonder what methods are going to make the most headway?
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.
I'm not sure if I understand the need for this system. Routing voice traffic is already done on a daily basis (dialpad.com). Automatic reply to voicemail messages is certainly something that exists already, and it seems everybody I know has some sort of wireless content service on their cellphone or PDA already.
What a directory like this could more likely be used for is marketing. Every night of the week, right when I sit down for dinner, I get a pointless marketing call from some schmoe who wants to sell me aluminum siding, or give me a great deal on a home loan. Yeah, this is just what need, now all those marketing people will be able to page me and leave me voicemails as well.
Would you like to pet my Penguin? The Linux Pimp
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I don't see why it's dumb, so you're going to have to back up your argument with a little more than a song.
Having a transition system is critical in deploying a new technology or migrating people to it. (Microsoft understands this very well, but that's a topic for another day) People aren't going to just say "Well, there are telephones on the Internet. I guess i can throw out my old phone." It's the whole chicken-and-egg thing.
Or more accurately, the chicken-and-another-chicken thing. Think- who bought the first telephone? The first fax machine? Why is everyone sticking with ICQ and Napster when better alternatives exist?
Because there is no migration path. We need something like this so that the old phones can use the new system and the new phones can use the old system. It also allows hybrid phones to be made.
But to just sweep this away at first glance because "well, you're just translating from one number to another number" is
I hope this doesn't get me branded "Flamebait", or worse, "Troll."
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