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How new telecoms view directory
publishing
Michael
Kakuschky,
Nikotel, DE
I will discuss Nikotel’s perspective as a middle‑sized ITSP of the future of directory services. I am the CIO of the Nikotel Corporation in San Diego USA and the CEO of the Econo Deutschland GmbH in Hamburg, Germany. The Econo Deutschland GmbH runs the business for the Nikotel Corporation in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Since 2003, we are operating the business from Germany. Today, we have around 350,000 subscribers for our VoIP services. The Econo Deutschland GmbH has 20 employees and over 1,500 partner companies that take care of our customers worldwide.
Until 2003, we used H.323 as our preferred VoIP protocol. We then changed to SIP. Since then, we have developed a lot of applications based on SIP.
Nikotel and Econo Deutschland GmbH provide PSTN to VoIP, fax to email, VoIP to PSTN and VoIP to VoIP services.
Five years ago there was one telephony based on the PSTN and GSM network. In the first stage of VoIP, there are two parallel universes: a PSTN network and a VoIP network. There was no gateway between these two networks. At the beginning of 2003, the first companies – Nikotel among them – offered the possibility to make calls from the VoIP network to the PSTN and mobile network. For this Nikotel provides gateways and SIP proxies. A convergence of the two worlds is a distinct possibility in the coming years. ENUM enables us to translate normal telephone numbers to SIP addresses, which are linked to the SIP devices used by our customers.
The future of the telephone network is one that is completely based on the SIP protocol. In 2010, most telephone networks will have moved to SIP.
How does Nikotel address VoIP subscribers? Our customers want to make calls and to be reachable on their VoIP devices. For this, we offer our customers a geographical number. They can get a German number with a special prefix for Internet phones and a call‑free 0800 number. The problem at the moment is that we cannot offer these numbers worldwide.
If SIP addresses are available for customers, they will be part of the address directory services. To provide users another view of address data, address services have to restructure their queries. Today, address directories presume a customer has a geographical point of view. In searching for a customer, you will look for a region, city or country. However, SIP addresses give us the possibility to look for customers using enterprise or organisation structure.
To be successful with SIP addresses, it is necessary that the ENUM standard will be accepted worldwide. Also on our wish list is a standardised interface data format to exchange subscriber information between address directory publishers and ITSPs. This is necessary because the ENUM does not provide all the information required for Yellow Pages or White Pages.
In the future online address directories and Yellow Pages will be used more than paper and CD. For the acceptance of SIP‑based voice services, it is very important that SIP addresses become part of their address in the records. Since only ITSP have subscriber records, they have to update the address records using address directory providers.
I will offer some examples of what could be possible. It could be possible to include the SIP address in online directory services. Then, by clicking on this address, I could call this customer. Such a connection can be built by a shared service that would have to be implemented by the ITSPs. SIP‑based Internet telephony offers the possibility of extending this model to the live video stream feature. This opens up new possibilities in the music and entertainment markets.