SIP in higher education

[Bill Reid <>]

After today's phone conference I reflected on why I think the proposed ISN 
scheme is worthwhile. I sort of alluded to it in my comments but I thought I 
would try and explain my thoughts more clearly.

ENUM may be useful if it ever became a reality and an individual subscriber or 
organization could have easy access for updating the information. It is really 
unclear whether this will happen in North America in the near future. Even if 
this became a reality there may still be a problem of acquiring DIDs at a 
reasonable price. Also because of number portability and geography ENUM seems to 
be hopelessly crippled with respect to who controls the number in the ENUM mapping.

ISN solves all of these problems. The mapping betwen URIs and ISNs is logical 
and follows the same authority structure. This is a huge advantage. For example 
once the U of Manitoba gets it ITAD it can easily assign a subscriber number to 
all of its 30,000+ email users. No additonal cost, no bureaucratic registration 
process, etc. There is no comparison to acquiring DIDs or even attempting to fit 
into one of the many E.164 ENUM systems.

The DNS resolution is similar to email and can be easily distributed. This is so 
much better than ENUM.

I am all for URIs and encouraging IP phone manufacturers to support them. I am 
sure this will eventually happen since I do not see email addresses being 
replaced with numbers. :-)

In the meantime the ISN is just a very logical way of representing a URI as a 
number. It follows a very similar structure. It allows an organization to easily 
represent ALL of its URI/email addresses as a number. As opposed to DIDs there 
is no requirement to immediately reassign a subscriber number if the person 
leaves the organization. Like email you can forward it to a new ISN number.

My feeling is that ISNs will facilitate the move to URIs not delay it. An ISN 
will be seen as a substitue for an URI/email address. You would never think of a 
DID in those terms.

Enough rambling,
Bill Reid
MRnet