Proposed Service Provider Identifiers Raise Commercial Concerns

The draft ITU-T recommendation on management and assignment of global service provider numbers has been tagged for approval by administrations due to its regulatory and policy implications, the ITU website said. The FCC, as the responsible agency for both service provider identities and the North American Numbering Plan, would have to implement a rulemaking proceeding, said an executive following the work. Telcordia and France Telecom in 2007 proposed a unique international resource for service provider identification in next generation networks. The executive who floated the idea for Telcordia now works for Neustar, which is continuing the work. Each country and its operators have recognized service provider or operator identifiers for maintaining interconnection arrangements and ensuring correct routing and meeting network addressing requirements, Telcordia said.

The Neustar move has complicated the challenges over the past year, said the executive who’s following the work. The challenge of using identifiers for service providers is increasingly difficult with the proliferation of services and providers, said the executive. He supports the idea of spurring interoperability for identifiers, but not the Neustar approach. The traditional methods of identifying providers in a trusted way don’t work well and tend to vary from service to service, he said.

Service providers need ways of determining and validating the called party’s service provider, network operator and location of a network interconnection point, the draft report on use of the identifiers said. Telephone numbers continue to be used as the primary identifier to recognize users, network termination points and to route services for traditional voice services, short and multimedia messaging and new IP-based services, it said. Neustar has called for a new identifier, consisting of five digits and handed out either by the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau or by national numbering administrators, the executive said, referring to Neustar’s possible positioning for the role. The identifiers have been variously dubbed a Service Provider Network identification or Service Provider Network Identifiers.

Specific fees weren’t discussed, the executive said. ITU membership fees and study group review of traffic records or some as yet undisclosed fee set by the national numbering administrators would likely be required, he said. The aim appears to be making a service provider identifier a prerequisite for getting network traffic routed, he said. Most parties said there was no need for such a system and that everyone already has too many provider identifiers, he said. The executive was referring to Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocation of 40,000 enterprise IDs.

Another complicating factor is that the Neustar executive leading the effort to write the use cases report also chairs the group where it will be submitted for consideration, the executive said. Telecom Italia formally complained about the way the procedure was set up, he said, and has had difficulty in getting its concerns included in the draft report. Telecom Italia told the meeting that implementing and managing new service provider network identifiers will be very expensive. The company also said the draft report fails to show any new need for identifiers that can’t be met with existing resources.

Determining the called party’s service provider is one of the biggest interconnection challenges facing service providers, the draft report said, because countries use non-standard identifying mechanisms to identify operators, service providers and networks. Nationally based identifiers associated to networks and network operators are used, for instance, for routing and number portability, it said. No standard or consistent international approach is recognized among or between operators, the draft said. Generally there’s no need for knowledge of a specific country’s routing or number portability mechanisms at the international level, Telecom Italia said in proposed changes.

Identifying a service provider that can transit calls to the called party’s provider is another challenge for the calling party’s service provider, the draft report said. The matter is about commercial and technical agreements between transit operators and originating and destination operators, Telecom Italia said in proposed revisions. Mobile operators use mobile country and network codes contained in an ITU-T recommendation on the international identification plan for public networks and subscriptions to identify the called party’s mobile network operator, but not for routing purposes, Telecom Italia said. All fixed or mobile, traditional or IP-based network service providers able to get access to international mobile subscription identities independent of national numbering plans from the recommendation could use them in the same way, it said.

The U.K. supported the idea of defining a single regime to identify service providers, although its use must still be defined. It should be flexible and independent so it can meet national regulatory requirements, that country said. The identification system should support geographic and non-geographic information in its structure, let recognized operating agencies use it in service offerings and have a central ITU record of the allocations. The U.K. said the system should allow for both global and national allocations, and support operators, but not impose requirements on current signaling protocols. The system should exist alongside existing methods of identification including the ITU-T recommendation on designations for interconnections among operators’ networks, the U.K. said.

An AT&T participant in IETF is drafting a report on IANA enterprise numbers as service provider network identifiers, which presumably extends across many operators, the executive said. He was referring to its possible discussion at a meeting of the “Data for Reachability of Inter/tra-NetworK SIP” group this week in Beijing. The report hasn’t been circulated, the executive said. The report likely will recommended using IANA enterprise IDs, the executive said.