Nominet have announced they have been given the contract to run the Tier 1 registry for ENUM in the UK, which, for those who don’t know, in short ENUM is a standard that will unify the telephone numbering system with the Internet’s Domain Name System.The Tier 1 registry for UK ENUM was awarded to Nominet by the UK ENUM Consortium (UKEC), a limited company set up with the recognition of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR, formerly the Department of Trade and Industry) to administer the UK ENUM top level domain. Nominet believe theywon the contract based on their understanding of the issues and challenges relating to best practice management of a top level domain according to their news release announcing the success of their bid. As part of the process of establishing the registry we will be joining the International Telecommunication Union, Telecommunication Standardization Sector, ITU-T.Nominet’s IT director Jay Daley is quoted as saying to IT Week, Enum will allow firms to benefit from the cost savings associated with VoIP without the need to sign up with a third-party provider such as Skype.The advantage of ENUM is that it is “designed to get around the problem that few phone keypads have an “@” key, which makes dialling an SIP address for a VoIP call tricky” according to The Register. “A VoIP user can be allocated a traditional phone number – technically an E.164, and anyone calling that number is connected to a gateway which then uses the Enum service to get an SIP address, and can then connect the call using the SIP protocol.”ENUM will make it possible to link different VoIP servers so that telephones within businesses that use VoIP technology can connect to businesses who use other VoIP providers via the Internet. As a result, telephone calls between businesses using this technology will be much cheaper or possibly even free, because there will be no need to connect to the telephone network for the call.For further reports and the Nominet news release see:
