ENUM (Electric Numbering System)

11 Pages 2765 Words

tant messenger, voice mail or any other form of electronic communication. Well ENUM, or short for “Electronic Numbering” is a system protocol that enables Internet-based users to make a selection from a range of services available for communicating with another person when the caller knows only a telephone number or has access only to a telephone keypad. It refers to the use of the Domain Name System (DNS) to look up telephone numbers and subsequently route telephone calls to the right destination using the Internet as the transmission means.


About ENUM


The ENUM technology is largely based off of a talented Swedish Cisco Systems engineer named Patrik Faltstrom, who “wanted to clear a frustrating clutter of pagers, e-mail accounts, cell phones, office phones, home phones, and instant messengers” (Borland 1). If all these points of communication could use a single number, the world would be a much simpler place, Faltstrom and fellow engineers believed (Borland). Among the companies that helped develop ENUM were Cisco, Lucent, Nortel and AT&T, along with the first ENUM products and services having emerged in the fall of 2001. Among the products and services available are devices such as Internet-enabled PBXs (private branch exchanges) and telephones, and service providers that are building in the required directories and other infrastructure that will make ENUM a much-needed service for initiating telephone calls over the Internet (Marsan 1).
Two key applications that ENUM will make possible for the first time is the ability to call a PC from the public-switched telecommunication network (PSTN) and to easily determine what type of terminal is associated with the number. Some analysts predict that this will permit the introduction of new innovative applications where a call to a telephone number can invoke Internet type services. For example, calling an ENUM-enabled telephone number from a 3rd generation multimedia h...