There was a flurry of discussion on the IPTEL list this morning about VoIP addressing and the like. This message was forwarded as part of the discussion.

SEE Below... Please contact me or Anne Brown <Anne.Brown.arbrown@nt.com mailto:Anne.Brown.arbrown@nt.com > of Nortel directly .... your timing is excellent. The IETF AD took 164 resolution off the agenda for IPTEL since they thought IPTEL bit off more than it could chew.

To All,

This correspondence is to invite you to participate in a work group, April 27, 98 in Anaheim, CA to establish an Internet Telephony Directory solution and service. Directory is the keystone to scalability and interconnection of Internet Telephony services. The promise of Internet Telephony cannot be realized unless there is a serious and realistic effort to develop and deploy a global trusted Internet Directory scheme for the Telephony Domain. And this will not happen without the cooperation of the major players from the beginning. At the next Electronic Messaging Association (EMA) meeting, the Internet Telephony Directory (ITD) Pilot Working Group will discuss solutions for an ITD framework. A deliverable of the WG will be an Internet draft to be proposed to the IETF as a standards track RFC. A second deliverable will be the establishment of a pilot service, perhaps run by a trusted third-party. The proposed draft which comes out of EMA will be used to launch an IETF WG at the next IETF meeting. You need not be a member of EMA to attend this first WG meeting but you must register. Attendance for committee meetings is free. Besides agreement to work toward a common solution, this WG also requires commitment form interested parities to contribute and/or prime these deliverables. Participants should be prepared to discuss deliverables and should be in a position to go back to their respective companies to solicit commitment to work toward a common solution and to commit resources. The following companies have thus far expressed an interest in this initiative: Lucent Microsoft Cisco Intel VocalTec Nortel

Please pass this invitation on to others whom you feel should be involved in this work. This work is being done in the EMA because the ITD problem is 1% technical and 99% commercial and political. Also the requirement for a pilot makes it outside the scope of the IETF. The initial Internet draft proposal and service pilot will be developed via at face-to-face meetings at EMA, which supports technical and marketing streams. This work is not being done in application specific forums because it is outside of the scope of voice over IP, Internet fax, voice messaging, vpn, conferencing or other Internet Telephony applications. Attached is the WG charter and meeting details. Richard Shockey’s “Internet Telephony Domain Service: A Business Case for Action” will also be sent to this list shortly, along with “ ITD: Overview of the Proposed EMA Pilot WG”. Regards, Anne Brown (Nortel) ITD Pilot Working Group Chair, EMA

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Charter: Internet Telephony Directory Pilot Working Group Description: End-users are faced with a wide variety of telephony applications with overlapping directory needs. The most common being the ability to locate address information for a targeted recipient, given only a telephone number. The goal of this work effort is to evaluate in a pilot, existing directory standards-based solutions. The pilot will provide direct feedback to vendors, service providers, and standards developers about what approaches are effective and which need to be changed. The pilot will also provide information to corporations about how to best plan, deploy and use directories in the telephony area and how to reduce their costs and risks. Scope: Note that this group is not solving routing problems. Nor is it defining any particular Internet Telephony service. What it will do is define an ITD framework to support the retrieval of destination address and additional service-specific information such as supported capabilities. Users and applications should not have to know anything but the E.164 telephone number in order to obtain this information. The individual directory schemas, which will define which attributes are used for which Internet Telephony services, are outside the scope of this WG. Each directory schema will be defined in the group or forum that is tasked with defining standards for that particular service. For example, the voice messaging directory schema < draft-ema-vpimdir-schema-00.txt.> was defined in EMA. The schema for Internet fax will most likely be defined in the fax working group of the IETF. The trial service will allow the exploration of governance and administration issues. Deliverables: An RFC, describing an ITD framework, for proposal as an Internet-Draft for IETF standards track. A pilot service, perhaps through tender, to prove the concept and to address various issues including:

• Allowing users to administer a single directory structure used by

multiple applications

• Simplified provisioning of shared directories
• Security

Time frame: The work group will start in April, 98 and will propose a pilot to be conducted in the Summer and Fall of 1998 and to be completed by the end of the year. The RFC final should result, at the end of the year, both from lessons learned from the pilot and from feedback from the IETF WG. Q and A: Below are several relevant questions and answers raised during early discussions: Q. Why is the Voice Messaging Committee examining this kind of issue? A. For the same reason that the EMA was a good place for Voice Messaging to be moved into the broader messaging framework. The Voice Messaging Committee will allow participants develop issues specific to telecommunications and Internet telephony. Once these are better understood, the EMA forum will allow discussions between end-users and vendors with a wide variety of messaging, security, and directory backgrounds. Q. How is this different from the VPIM directory effort? A. The VPIM directories effort has developed a schema and a shared directory pilot focused on voice messaging. VPIM directories are only one part of the broader Internet telephony and telecommunications directory picture. This work group would examine directories from a much broader perspective. Q. Isn’t this already being done in other telephony groups? A. There are groups such as the Voice over IP forum and the ???. It is anticipated that the Voice Messaging Committee will liaise with these groups and will formulate joint efforts as needed. However, the EMA is a very good place to start this directory discussion as it applies to corporations and to issues beyond those related to specific IP protocols. Q. Who would be participating? A. Participation is open. It is likely that vendors and service providers would provide the initial effort to get the pilot defined and initiated. At that point it is hoped that corporations would participate in the pilot both as sites and for evaluations, comment and feedback. Q. What is the Voice Message Committee Charter? A. The EMA Voice Messaging Committee facilitates the integration of voice, telephony, and CTI with other messaging media. This Committee will address the enhanced interoperability of voice based applications by building consensus and encouraging standards for voice based platforms. This committee will also represent the voice and telephony technology issues in the general work of the EMA.

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Meeting Details Monday, April 27, 98 Time to be announced. You need not be a member of EMA to attend this first WG meeting. Meeting Details: Anaheim Marriott Orange County Ballroom, Salons 1-4 Anaheim, CA

The Anaheim Marriott is across the street from the Anaheim Hilton and the Anaheim Convention Center—site of EMA’98. Committee meeting attendance is FREE to employees of EMA member companies, but you must reserve your place by returning the Committee registration form <http://www.ema.org/html/at_work/committe/regform.htm http://www.ema.org/html/at_work/committe/regform.htm > to EMA by Monday, April 20 to ensure that you can participate. Please Note: Committee meeting registration is completely separate from EMA’98 registration. For more details see < http://www.ema.org/html/at_work/committe/cwgmeet.htm%3E http://www.ema.org/html/at_work/committe/cwgmeet.htm> . For more information about EMA Committees, see < http://www.ema.org/ http://www.ema.org/ > or contact: Paul Moniz, Vice President, (Tel. 703/524-5550 x. 231 or Internet: paul.moniz@ema.org mailto:paul.moniz@ema.org , X.400: G=paul; S=moniz; O=ema; A=mci; C=us) Electronic Messaging Association 1655 North Fort Myer Drive, Suite 500 Arlington, VA 22209 T: 703/524-5550 F: 703/524-5558

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Internet Telephony Domain Service A Business Case for Action April 1, 1998

Richard Shockey 8045 Big Bend Blvd Suite 110 St. Louis, MO Voice 314.918.9020 Fax 314.918.9015 Mail rshockey@ix.netcom.com mailto:rshockey@ix.netcom.com

Historical Introduction Over the past several years it has been manifestly self evident that traditional telephony applications such as voice and fax can be transported over public and private packet routed networks [The Internet] in parallel to the General Switched Telephone Network [GSTN]. Hundreds of new products and services have been developed and introduced to make Internet Telephony a reality. Tens of millions of dollars in Research and Development funds have been spent by technology companies creating a comprehensive suite of standards and processes to enable wide spread deployment. The promise of Internet Telephony cannot be realized unless there is a serious and realistic effort to develop and deploy a global trusted Internet Directory scheme for the Telephony Domain. Internet Telephony must be made as transparent and as easy to use as traditional analog phone calling. Internet Telephony must be able to promise advanced services, such as video and not just toll avoidance As it stands now there is no practical method by which a individual can place a Internet Telephone Call using a GSTN phone number that crosses Internet domains. Internet Telephony cannot scale on either a wide area or global basis. Major corporations and institutions have spent billions of dollars deploying TCP/IP networks for both internal and wide area applications. Major service providers including current ILEC’s and CLEC’s and PTT authorities are looking to deploy advanced service offerings based on TCP/IP networking. There is a strong desire to optimize the return on investment on these networks as well as provide advanced communications services currently unavailable on analog based GSTN networks. The Problem... With all of the work that has been done in developing standards and interoperability processes within the Internet Telephony industry a major problem has been left undone. How do you locate an Internet Telephony user and identify what resources are available to that user? Telephony addressing has always been numeric in nature, unlike Internet applications which rely on easy to understand and remember character based names, such as www.telephony.com http://www.telephony.com . Internet applications have always relied on PC or other terminals that have 101 character keyboards or other similar devices. There are literally hundreds of millions of “terminals”, namely telephone key sets that do not have keyboards. There should be a way to transparently permit these devices to access IP related services, principally real time voice, fax or video like services. This author is reminded of the famous scene in the movie 2001 where the director of the space agency Heywood Floyd, while stopping over on the space station places a video phone call to his family. He used nothing more that a traditional 12 button telephone key pad to complete the call. Why not make these services available NOW!

All of technical pieces of the puzzle are in place except one. The Market It should be noted that some estimates by NationsBanc Montgomery Securities and the Frost and Sullivan research firm have indicated the IP telephony market place could grow to 2.5 billion dollars within 3 years. This is a substantial number, even though technology industry market research is notoriously suspect. This potential market could be impaired if Internet Telephony is not made as simple and transparent to use as traditional telephony. It is useful to note again that Internet Telephony is not just about toll avoidance. There will be toll savings to institutions and enterprises over the short term, however it is the ability to deliver advanced telephony services such as video, color fax or easy to set up conference calling that is the ultimate goal of this technology as well as unify the management of networks across the enterprise. The Solution A system must be devised to allow any Internet Telephony Application [Voice. Fax, Video, etc] application to “resolve” the address of the Internet Telephony user or resource using nothing more that a GSTN number to place the call. This requirement demands that an independent trusted 3rd party Internet Telephony Directory Service [IDTS] must be developed, deployed and maintained to service the upper level infrastructure of telephony related applications. There are several possible approaches to the problem including LDAP/X.500 and DNS. What is lacking is the specific plan to achieve a solution and the commitment of major industry players to deploy a working experiment. It is the opinion of this author that of all the possible approaches, the technology of the existing DNS system offers a proven and scaleable solution. What the Solution is NOT! Many attempts and proposals have been made over the past several years to look at Internet Directory services, IMHO these proposals have been much too expansive in scope. They have attempted to “End World Hunger”, so to speak. They have not focused on the specific needs of a single application such as telephony.

] The ITDS is not a “Universal Telephony Directory Assistance” or “White Pages”. It is nothing more and nothing less than a method to resolve the “telephony service address” and discover user capabilities based on the knowledge of a GSTN number. For instance: 13149189020 resolves to > gate.domain.com and/or ldap.domain.com or john.smith@domain.com mailto:john.smith@domain.com . The use of LDAP in this example could offer real time telephony applications the OPTION of sending an SMTP voice-fax-video message or set up a session based service. Comprehensive directory services raise serious questions of individual privacy and security that must be taken into account in the selection of any technology that addresses this problem. Issues of interoperability or settlements among providers are considered out of scope for this proposal. The Task In order to preserve ,protect and defend the investments the technology industry has made in Internet Telephony, advance the state of the art and grow the market for these services, collective action must be taken now to develop ITDS. It is the belief of this author that the effort must be based on the common agreements of several select companies with serious economic interests in this area. Only those companies with significant financial and personnel resources to commit to the task should be directly involved in the early stages of development. Significant questions must be sorted out. Agreement and concessions by known competitors will have to be made. The Organization Decisions need to be made quickly on what should be the proper “home” for such a effort. There are many alternatives. Clearly standards work would proceed through traditional venues such as the IETF or ITU. Actual sponsorship of a experimental ITDS root system might be though an organization such as the EMA but for practical as well as legal matters it is suggested that 2 not for profit legal entities be set up. One in Canada and one in the United States to share responsibility for an experimental server system and eventually take over the responsibility of administration for a ITDS for the North American Numbering Plan area [ 1 ] It would be anticipated that entities wishing to participate in the experimental servers system would manage numbers within their own national country codes or zones [Britain - 44, Japan -77, etc] The Politics There should be no illusion in any ones mind that this effort, especially if it is supported by major industry participants will immediately come under public and political scrutiny by the technology industry and governments. The establishment of, for that matter, even the suggestion of an effort to establish of any form or alternative application specific root system on the Internet carries risk. It should be noted that there continues to be a legal and technical uproar that surrounding the Top Level Domain administration of the Internet and the administration of .COM by Network Solutions, Inc. under its contract to the National Science Foundation by the authority on the IANA. Should the task of setting up a experimental ITDS be successful it will be inevitable that the developers of such a system seek ...indeed demand some form of legal sanction from appropriate regulatory authorities. It is the opinion of this author that the eventual settlement of the tldDNS issue may provide an appropriate model to recommend for long term ITDS governance as well.

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Richard Shockey 8045 Big Bend Blvd. Suite 110 St. Louis, MO 63119 Voice 314.918.9020 Fax 314.918.9015 INTERNET Mail & IFAX : rshockey@i mailto:rshockey@ix.netcom.com x.netcom.com <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

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