International Telecommunication Union
ITU-T activities
Numbering, Naming and Addressing
(ENUM, IDN, Ipv6, ccTLD)
Greg Jones
ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau
greg.jones@itu.int
ITU Seminar on the Standardization and ICT development for the Information Society
Uzbekistan, 6-8 October 2003
Why is this ENUM important?
o Mapping of telephone numbers onto
Internet.
o Could allow conventional telephones to
call IP terminals (PCs).
o Should telephone numbers used in this
way be subject to government oversight
and regulation?
o Who should exercise control over
telephone numbers used in this way?
6-8 October 2003
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Issues of Convergence
o Problems of addressing calls that pass from
one network service to another:
• Now widely possible to originate calls from IP
address-based networks to other networks
• But uncommon to terminate calls from other
networks to IP address-based networks
• To access a subscriber on an IP address-based
network, some sort of global addressing scheme
across PSTN and IP address-based networks needed
o ENUM may be solution…
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Caveats
o Complex topic
o Focused on E.164 infrastructure and
policy issues, not ENUM services
o Work in progress
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Some Complexities
o In telecommunication numbering, regulatory
tradition with strong government involvement
(e.g., number portability,consumer
protection)
o In the Internet, management of naming and
addressing has been left to “industry selfregulation”
o National numbering/regulatory authorities
involved in coordinating ENUM servers &
services for their portion of E.164 resources in
respective countries
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Roles and Responsibilities
o Most ENUM service and administrative
decisions are national issues under purview of
ITU Member States, since most E.164
resources are utilized nationally
o ITU will need to ensure that Member State has
specifically authorized inclusion of geographic
country code in the DNS
o In integrated numbering plan, each ITU
Member State within plan may administer
their portion of E.164 resources mapped into
DNS as they see fit
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ITU Responsibilities
o Define and implement administrative
procedures that coordinate delegations
of E.164 numbering resources into the
agreed DNS name servers
 Draft Recommendation E.A-ENUM is being
prepared by Study Group 2
6-8 October 2003
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National Consideration Issues
o Consultation process with interested
communities
o National deployment Issues
• How do you authenticate the identity of the
subscriber for ENUM services?
• Who are ENUM Registrars and what are they
responsible for?
• How do you validate ENUM data for potential users
(Add - Modify – Delete) NAPTR list of services and
preferences?
• How is data provisioned in the country code name
servers?
• Competition issues
6-8 October 2003
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ITU Past Activities
o Preparation and circulation of tutorial
papers
o ITU-T SG 2 Supplement on issues that
need to be addressed by national and
international authorities
o ITU-T SG 2 Meetings in 2001 and 2002
o Discussion with IETF and RIPE NCC on
roles and responsibilities
6-8 October 2003
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ITU Future Activities
o Cooperate with IAB/IETF to make final
choice of TLD, registry, requirements
for registry operations
o Interim administration
o Determine E.A-ENUM
See also: itu.int/ITU-T/inr/enum
and itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/enum
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Demand for Multilingualism
o For example, largest percentage of
o
o
o
o
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Internet users now in the Asia-Pacific
region
Consequence of the Internet “globalization” is
growing number of users not familiar with
ASCII
Domain names in ASCII characters poses
significant linguistic barrier
Native speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, Russian, Tamil, Thai and others who
use non-ASCII scripts at considerable
disadvantage
Requirement for “internationalization” of the
Internet’s Domain Name System
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IDN is…
o Abbreviation for “Internationalized domain
name”
o Refers to a domain name where one or
more characters not in historical subset of
Latin LDH set (a-z), digits (0-9) and hyphen
(LDH) used in the DNS
o Associated with Unicode (ISO 10646)-based
labels
o Major transition from 38 characters to
more than tens of thousands possible
Unicode “code points”
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“Unicode” Examples
• Arabic (Arabic)
• Han (Chinese)
• Arabic (Persian)
• Armenian
• Bengali
• Cyrillic (Russian)
• Hangul
• Devanagari (Hindi)
• Hebrew
• Georgian
• Hiragana
• Greek
• Khmer
• Gujarati
• Malayalam
• Gurmukhi
• Syriac
ゆにこおど
• Tamil
• Thai
6-8 October 2003
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APT-ITU Joint Workshop on
ENUM and IDN
25-26 August 2003, Bangkok, Thailand
o The APT-ITU Joint Workshop on ENUM
and IDN was held in Bangkok, Thailand,
from 25 to 26 August 2003.
o For further information, please visit:
www.aptsec.org/seminar/APT-Seminar.htm
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Future ITU Activities
o IDN implementation experiences discussions in
o
o
o
o
o
6-8 October 2003
number of ITU forums (future IDN workshops (e.g.,
pan-Arab region, IP symposium in CIS states, IP
policy manuals)
Bring together experts so that they can share
experiences for the benefit of others
Build knowledge base of materials and
implementations available to ITU Member States
Discuss role of national administrations of ITU
Member States and possible policy role they may
wish to consider
Discuss further cooperative measures at both
regional and international levels, particularly with
regard to assisting developing countries in their
consideration of these new technologies?
Ideas?
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A Policy Look at IPv6
Outline
o What is IPv6
o Address space exhaustion
o Relationship to topology
o Alternatives to IPv6
o Network problems
o Space allocation policy
o Deployment difficulties
o Roadblocks and solutions
o ITU and IPv6
Based on a paper by John Klensin, available at:
http://web/itudoc/itu-/com2/infodocs/015.html
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What is IPv6
o IPv6 (Internet Protocol, version 6) was
developed by the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), starting in 1993,
o in response to a series of perceived
problems,
o primarily exhaustion of the current, IP
version 4 (IPv4), address space
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Address space exhaustion
(1/3)
o Rate and scale of Internet growth was
underestimated
o In 1970’s, 32-bit address space was thought to
be adequate for long term
o Class system (A, B, C)
o Internet routing is closely tied to the
separation of routing within a network and
routing between networks
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Address space exhaustion
(2/3)
o Routing within large networks became
complex
o Sub netting introduced
o Advent of PCs meant that each host could no
longer have a unique fixed IP address
• dynamic address assignment (reachability?)
• private address spaces (leakage if
connected to public network)
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Address space exhaustion
(3/3)
o In 1995, classless system was introduced
o RIRs became more conservative with respect
to address allocation
o Some believe IPv4 addresses will be exhausted
in 2-3 years, others in 10 years, others sooner,
others much later.
o Rate of exhaustion influenced by technology
(e.g. NATing) and RIR policies as well as
growth
o Under-use of certain class A, B allocations
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Relationship to topology
(1/3)
o An IP address is not similar to a
telephone number
o An IP address is a routing address
o In telephony terms:
• a telephone number is more like a
domain name
• an IP address is more like a SANC
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Relationship to topology
(2/3)
o But analogies are imperfect
• Telephone numbers identify a circuit,
a wire going somewhere, but are now
portable
• IP addresses identify a terminal
device, a computer, but can be:
• dynamically assigned
• translated (NATing)
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Relationship to topology
(3/3)
Back to the basics of Internet:
o Any host can access any other host
through uniform protocols and
addresses
o Network is dumb
o Intelligence at the edges
o Applications independent of network
o Network does not change content
These differences are more important
than the packet vs. switched models
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Alternatives to IPv6
o Application servers at boundary of
public network, translate to private
network, but these gateways can limit
functionality
o NATing, VPNs, private spaces, but may
force re-numbering
 NATing limits peer-to-peer
applications
 IPsec requires end-to-end
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Network Problems
Expanding address space raises certain issues
o Routing table growth (IPv6 may help or
hinder)
o Blocks allocated to ISPs to optimize
routing limit portability across ISPs
o Security may or may not be improved
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Space allocation policies
o RIRs allocate to LIRs (optimizes routing)
o If IPv6 policies are conservative, this
may slow the adoption of IPv6
o If IPv6 policies are loose, this may lead
to routing table problems and early
exhaustion
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Deployment difficulties
o Dual stack: v4 and v6 in devices
o Tunnels: encapsulate v4 in v6 or v6 in v4
o Conversion gateways
o Convert networks
• from the edges
• from the core
• by islands, either geographic or by
application (3G)
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Potential roadblocks and
solutions
o Cost of conversion
o Lack of confidence in v6 software
o Policies (will)
Consensus is that conversion is needed, but when
and how will depend on many factors
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ITU and IPv6
o ITU’s mission includes providing
information on new technologies to its
membership, IPv6 is a good example
o A Tutorial Workshop was held in Geneva
on 6 May 2002, see:
itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/ipv6
o Further events are being considered
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ITU-T and ICANN Reform
ccTLD issues
Outline
o Some issues regarding ICANN Reform
o Proposals
o Conclusion
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Some ICANN Reform issues
The President of ICANN has stated that ICANN cannot fulfill
its mission and has called for reform and for:
o Greater government involvement
o Increased funding
Among the specific problems identified, we mention:
o ICANN has been too slow to address and resolve issues
o ICANN lacks clear, stable, and accepted processes and
procedures
o ICANN has not yet created an adequate industrygovernment partnership
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Specific ccTLD issues
o Most ccTLD managers have not signed the contracts
proposed by ICANN
o Some ccTLD managers have stated that they are not
satisfied with the services provided by ICANN
o There are tensions between some ccTLD managers
and their governments (mostly outside Europe)
o Conversely, some governments feel that the ccTLD
manager does not act in the interest of the country
(particularly when the ccTLD appears to have been
“high-jacked” by a foreign company)
The above is not intended to be a criticism of ICANN, but
merely a reflection of the current situation.
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Workshop on Member States'
Experiences with ccTLDs
Geneva, 3-4 March 2003
o The purpose of this open workshop was to begin to work
with Member States and Sector Members, recognizing
the activities of other appropriate entities, to review
Member States' ccTLD and other related experiences, in
accordance with Resolution 102 as revised at the
Plenipotentiary Conference in Marrakesh (2002)
o The convening letter (TSB Circular 135) is available at:
itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/circ/01-04_1/135_ww9.doc and
Add.1 at: itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/cctld/135add1e.doc
o Open to ccTLD operators and any other interested
parties
o For additional information on this workshop, please
visit: itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/cctld
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Proposals
o ccTLDs and governments could work
together to agree ITU-T Recommendations
related to ccTLD issues, in particular redelegation issues
– Issue for open discussion: local vs. global
boundaries
o The management teams of CENTR and
other ccTLD forums could engage in dialog
with ITU-T to explore this and other areas
for cooperation
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Conclusions on ccTLD
 ITU-T could help ICANN to achieve the
ccTLD-government consensus that appears
to be missing today, by using ITU-T’s wellproven processes and procedures.
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