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Australia Trials Phone To IP Service
daria42 writes "Australia is doing trial runs with a technology which could connect conventional phone numbers with Web pages, Internet fax services and other online resources. Subscribers to an ENUM service register their other contact details, then set up rules that control how and when calls to their phone are routed. For example, calls from anybody but close family could be routed straight to voicemail between 6pm and 11pm. Because it connects to any IP service, incoming callers could also use phone numbers to access Web sites, the Skype VoIP application, faxes and other applications."
(I'm not gonna pretend that I understood all the answers ...)
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
It's not normally Australia lagging behind, but the UK have already done this and produced a report. Particularly of note is the assertion that there needs to be a process put in place to identify who actually owns each number. The telcos cannot be relied upon because they are either lazy, or simply do not want to lose a revenue stream.
Memorizing a 10-digit number instead of the word "Google" isn't making things much easier for people
That's not really all that ENUM does. ENUM isn't grown up yet, but think of it as a DNS for phone numbers and then some. You wouldn't want to have to type in the IP address every time you wanted to view a web page, would you? ENUM does the same for telephony as DNS does for the web. The strongest use of ENUM, IMHO will be the ability to "follow" someone no matter what phone they're on based upon the rules they set up with their ENUM service. If ENUM matures enough and is widely accepted, you won't need to know a persons home number, cell number and work number; ENUM takes care of that automatically.
I want the opposite: I want my phone number to be arbitrary text of my choosing.
In the future, you might be able to register a telephony domain name much the same way you can register and internet domain name.