The future of telecom

[unixronin]

Google's Voice service lets you have a single master number that is automatically forwarded to as many other numbers as you designate, within reason. It's a good idea. But the US is running out of phone numbers as it is, and there probably aren't enough allocatable phone numbers remaining to let everyone do this without revamping the entire US phone number system.

But what if we rethought the whole concept of phone numbers?

Historically, one number has been tied to one phone line. You may have multiple phones on that line, and you may have a phone that has multiple lines coming into it, and ISDN phones have the capability to have up to three "appearances" of the same number on the line. But still, one number is tied to one line — or, in the case of mobile phones, one number is tied to one mobile phone. This metaphor has been a good match for the way the technology has always worked. But the technology is changing — already has changed enormously — and we don't have to do that any more.

Suppose we decoupled phone numbers from devices, and tied them instead to people and to roles, replacing a 1:1 mapping between phones and numbers with a many-to-many mapping. You have, for example, a personal phone number, an office phone number, and an on-call phone number. Your home phone is subscribed to your personal number — except that on days when you work from home, you subscribe it for the day to your office number as well. Your mobile phone is subscribed to your personal number and your on-call number. The phone on your office desk at work is subscribed to your office number and your on-call number. Perhaps you have a team number as well, that everyone on your work team is subscribed to. Whenever any of your phones rings, the display tells you not only who's calling you, but which of your subscribed numbers they're calling — and which of their numbers they're calling you from. That incoming call on your office phone is from your Cisco rep, but he's calling you from his personal number, perhaps to let you know he's in the area and ask whether you want to meet for lunch.

Discuss....

Comments

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

This sounds quite a lot like XMPP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP). What you’re talking about here is very similar to XMPP’s idea of “presence.”

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

If it’s not clear, I think presence is a great idea and I wish more protocols incorporated it — I’m a big supporter. This is clearly, obviously, the Right Thing To Do.

[databeast.livejournal.com]

Yup, and googlevoice supports that as well with its android app.

On a sidenote, I remember us working on MobileIP back in my days working in cellular (2000/2001) so we could bind one IP to a device and let it wander from network to network, there's certainly a lot of the necessary infrastructure to support identity-roaming/prescence in the existing phone system. There's just not enough of a financial incentive to do so yet.

remember, it took an act of Congress, to force the telco's to migrate your existing phone number from one carrier to another.. They gave a lot of technical bullshit reasons why they couldn't for years until eventually government just demanded they did.. suddenly it works now without any 'reimagining of the phone network'

When it comes to telephony.. customer demand doesn't matter squat.. until they're actually losing customers to a competitor who offers that service...

Qwest has been doing a version of 'prescence' between your mobile and landline accounts for a while.. user-friendliness ensured that only dedicated business users really made use of it though (IIRC)

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

How long until sales droids use their personal numbers as outgoing profiles on their calls to try and avoid filtering?

The EU has some parts of the above system already, by way of prefix based codes, with "extensions" that you dial in the initial setup.
... 1 = work
... 2 = personal
... 3 = mobile
... 4 = fax

Where this fails is that you might want your work # to be from a allocation block for your company.

The only way that real progress will be made, is for each person to have a digital agent, and the calls are made as a function of:
(source person, source profile, destination person)
The agent (which would be to be always accessible) decides how to handle the call. And controlling what device rings or voicemail answers based on your location and status.

Every device needs to have a number while active for functionality, it's device-unique for connecting purposes, not person-unique, and we need to separate the need for humans to use the numbers.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

How long until sales droids use their personal numbers as outgoing profiles on their calls to try and avoid filtering?

Let's see, that'll work ... hmm, let me see ... maybe once per salesdroid?

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of saledroids :-(

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

How thorough would this profile have to be, and what would it do to identity theft?

I have a unique name. What would Terry Scott, a former coworker, need to have to make sure that anyone wanting to connect to her would actually get her?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I have a unique name. What would Terry Scott, a former coworker, need to have to make sure that anyone wanting to connect to her would actually get her?

What does she do now?

If, when you ask "what would it do to identity theft", you're thinking about someone else subscribing to your phone number and masquerading as you, that problem is one that can probably be best solved by using public-key cryptography to secure and authenticate subscriptions.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

She's still there. I'm the one who's gone ;)

No, I'm not thinking about someone pretending to be someone else in that sense. I'm more concerned with having yet-another database with my info in it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Why would it be any worse than the phone book?

Your phone company already stores far more information about you than your phone listing makes available to the public. The only additional piece of information they'd need to store would be a public key, which could be a dedicated key that you use ONLY for phone authentication, and which would do no identity thief any use unless they also possessed your matching secret key.

If anything, the need for that key to authenticate you for subscription purposes would strengthen your protection against identity theft. Cracking a 2048-bit public key by brute force is so computationally infeasible that, if you could capture all the rest of the Sun's output for the rest of its stellar lifecycle and dedicate all of that energy to the task, you could not exhaust the entire keyspace. Barring completely revolutionary new mathematical attacks, properly-constructed 2048-bit public-key encryption is, for all even remotely practical purposes, unbreakable.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

While I generally agree re: the intractability of NP–complete problems, there are a couple of important caveats.

• PKI is sorely lacking and nobody really has any idea how to roll it out
• There’s strong evidence (http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/abstracts/no_rsa_red.html) that breaking rsa is not dependent on factoring large composites
• It is thermodynamically possible to use the Sun’s energy to exhaust the space of 2048–bit primes. Even a 4k factoring challenge only has a work factor of around 2**168; the Sun’s lifetime energy is about enough to do a work factor of 2**210.

In the main, though, I concur.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I guess my math was off. (Or more to the point, I think, I was remembering the math for the wrong problem.) Mea culpa.

I hadn't heard about that result...

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

In a way, that's what Google is doing. Trying to decouple phone numbers from devices. And, IIRC, the underlying product they based it upon (Grand Central) does that via SIP -- the backhaul isn't another group of phone numbers, but IP addresses on devices that provide a presence to the server.

caller
-> phone number
-> SIP server
-> SIP user account
-> zero or more presence entries for that account
-> SIP over IP
-> SIP device
-> callee

With the possibility of many SIP devices connecting to the user account on that SIP server.

The problem is: there aren't enough SIP devices out there to make that currently more than a niche environment. To reach a huge audience, you need to allow legacy devices in too. And they don't use SIP, nor a SIP-like mechanism, to address themselves and provide presence information. They use ... phone numbers.

Hopefully Google didn't remove SIP from Grand Central when they bought/re-branded it. SIP, or a SIP-like protocol, is really what the future of telephony you're hinting at, ought to be. But we're not there yet. Carriers block it, refuse to subsidize devices that include SIP clients, etc.

LTE and WiMAX (which layer everything on top of IP anyway, making something SIP-like inevitable) will hopefully change that... but we'll just have to wait and see. Hopefully, though, SIP wont go the way of multi-cast-backbone, and end up getting replaced by lesser & proprietary "streaming protocols" put in place by companies that had no interest in doing things the right way, nor in adopting something done "the internet way".

[laurarey.livejournal.com]

I set up something for one of my clients that has been helpful and is similar, at least in practice, to some of what has been mentioned. Bell offers something called single-number-reach. It is a virtual number to which multiple lines, including an international toll-free number, are linked. It offers a really handy online interface that allows me to actually listen to voicemail on my browser. It will also notify me when I have had a call.

I've been seriously thinking about doing this for our personal lives as well and putting ALL our phones on it. It handles faxes as well.

[lizzibabe.livejournal.com]

Riddle me this. Say I have both a cell phone and a landline. The cell phone number goes out to family, close friends, doctors offices, and suchlike. The landline goes out to salespeople, and first dates, so that they have a phone number that goes to a voicemail that's *not* on my hip. How would that work under this new system?

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

The biggest financial complaint that I see the Bell companies (and their competition) making is that something like this effectively nukes the concept of "long distance".

Not that I'm against nuking long distance charges, but money talks, and I don't have that much.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"Long distance" is dying anyway. It's a little-known fact that before the enforced AT&T breakup, AT&T was planning to do away with long distance charges altogether, and one of the real reasons behind the forced breakup was that the other long-distance carriers screamed bloody murder because they knew they'd be out of business almost overnight.

[danjite.livejournal.com]

First- what do you make of this:

http://www.trademe.co.nz/Antiques-collectables/Militaria/Other/auction-267219594.htm

Second, and more relevant- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENUM

OK, sleep now....

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's a Lefaucheaux-type pinfire revolver. The photos are very poor, but it appears to be a Belgian revolver like the one at the bottom of this page (http://www.horstheld.com/0-pinfire.htm), probably in 9mm. It's certainly an interesting curio for a collector, but the ammunition for it hasn't been made in over a hundred years, so there would be no chance of ever firing it unless you can figure out a way to make your own ammunition. (At the top of that page, there's a tin of 9mm pinfire ammunition containing 47 of the original 50 rounds, with an asking price of $500. It's anyone's guess whether any of them would still function.)

As for the other, interesting reading. I think ENUM, like XMPP, goes part of the way, but there's quite a way still to go.