[Serusers] e164 exchanges

[John Todd]

At 6:52 PM +0300 on 4/25/05, Juha Heinanen wrote:
>   http://www.e164.org is another root registry aimed at CC '1' while the
>   ENUM LLC launches its 1.e164.arpa trials.
>
>   As for a list of companies that are participating in any registry, it's
>   something I've yet to see anywhere.
>
>i tried last week to call a u.s. 800 number using www.e164.org and
>freenum.org enum, which both point to tf.voipmich.com.  in summary: it
>was impossible to get connected.  looks like their gws are full or
>broken.
>
>a service like that has to work reliably or it is good for nothing.
>
>-- juha

You're right.  The gateway parsing 1-800 (and other toll-free US 
numbers) is not accepting connections.  I've notified the owner of 
the gateway, and hopefully we'll see it back on-line shortly.  In the 
meantime, I've commented out those gateways.

The freenum.org site relies on the kindness of gateway operators to 
keep the system running, and I need to put some test cases in there 
to periodically test connectedness, I suppose.  I have some test 
numbers in each nation that has a gateway, but I don't have any 
automated way of testing it other than seeing what SIP messages I get 
back.  I suppose the best possible test would be a toll-free 
destination that constantly sends a DTMF sequence so I could match 
against it with an automated Asterisk process...

While I agree that the freenum.org gateways have to be functional for 
these services to be useful, I would also say that their use is 
currently "optional", so a failover plan should always be in place at 
the originating gateway end.  Due to the volunteer nature of the 
project, it is probable that some gateways are full or off-line, so 
having multiple ENUM replies back at the same priority level would be 
nice, so that the query would have multiple answers through which the 
originating gateway could cascade.  In the worst case, a failed SIP 
lookup should just send the call out the usual pathway (PSTN? Paid 
SIP transit? ...) to the destination.

VOLUNTEERS WANTED:  Anyone who has spare capacity on their gateway 
(at least 15 trunks for +1, but any number of trunks >3 for any other 
nation) is encouraged to contact me off-list to set up an NAPTR entry 
in the zone for their nation.  This is a for-free effort, and there's 
no obligation other than to give "best-effort" to terminating calls 
into the toll-free number ranges for your nation.



JT