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

[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.