And who has the rights to announce? With IP, you are disincentivized from having all the traffic flow through one's network if it can be avoided, because that is additional cost that the customer doesn't want to pay and additional overhead and management for the IP provider. So they say "hey, this is our IP space, but we will delegate it to you and you can announce it to the Internet" and that way the traffic goes a hopefully more direct and cost-controlled route. With phone numbers, carriers get to charge a fee for the privilege of having calls flow through their network. They've always gotten a fee. The whole industry relies on that fee. And it is because they "own" the phone numbers from the central authority, NANPA. And that central authority holds the LRN database. Which is their carrier of record for a phone number. To be the carrier of record, you have to be a CLEC or ILEC and "pay" to be trusted by the central authority. But in reality, the LRN database isn't the business that provides the end-user service. What we could do is simply create a numbering space that worked on existing phones. What if we had a numbering system that enabled a device to have an address that worked everywhere? Hmmm... don't we have that? IPv6? "500" numbers? https://www.neustar.biz/blog/story-500-numbers Alas... the carriers have control of this industry. They won't delegate authority to their resellers because they would lose revenue, and they already have the infrastructure to handle the traffic. We can try and build a system to circumvent them, but it must automatically and cryptographically ensure that the company that says "Send calls to this number to this set of IP addresses" actually is responsible for the end-user termination. And since any customer in the chain can perform such a registration, with no real automated way to determine hierarchy, the system will be flawed. NANPA -> Level3 -> reseller A -> reseller B -> reseller C -> end-user Level3 could say "Send calls to me!" with this system Reseller A, B, or C (or all three!) could say "Send calls to me!" A sophisticated end-user could say "Send calls to me!" But unless we know that hierarchy above, who is right? Which company cuts out the most middle-men? And I'm pretty sure that any reseller chain would require the participation of all resellers, and frankly, they EACH get a tenth of a cent or more per minute, so WHY would they? And how would the purchaser know or determine the reseller chain? Most companies do not disclose their ULCs. Plus if any of the resellers offer value-add services to the receiver, those are lost in this scenario. Though many of us may do all the value-add on our ends, many do not. But if we can figure it out, man will it make troubleshooting calls a lot more simple (though simultaneously complicated because you have to call someone else for each problematic call, but at least no more "we're waiting on the ULC to respond"). Beckman On Mon, 7 Dec 2015, Alex Balashov wrote:
On 12/07/2015 04:42 PM, Peter Beckman wrote:
But this has a flaw. What if the reseller does this, and the reseller's reseller does this. Who wins? As a reseller, I'd want the calls hitting me first, so I can bill my reseller for minutes. But my reseller wants calls going straight to them so they don't have to pay me for minutes.
This would probably be fixable if all DIDs from ULCs were delegated out of larger blocks that fall on decimal boundaries, which would be analogous to an opaque BGP announcement of a shorter prefix by an upstream aggregator.
But, because many numbers are ported in, this would be akin to announcing lots of /32s and, as you mentioned, without the critical component of physical connections constraining the routing topology.
Any such scheme would have to incorporate the notion of a reseller chain into its mechanics and a security model that allows downstream resellers to modify the physical parameters of their receipt of the call but not the fundamental routing chain.
-- Alex
-- Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC 303 Perimeter Center North, Suite 300 Atlanta, GA 30346 United States
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