RE: telephone URLs, comments on draft-antti-telephony-url-04

At 15.59 -0700 98-06-29, Larry Masinter wrote:
>Patrik, the Internet Fax group came to a different conclusion, after
>consultation
>with a number of experts in the telephone industry.

I was personally in contact with the people responsible for the planning of
telephone numbers in the country code 46, i.e. Sweden, and they did see
problems with relative phone numbers, especially in areas like Europe,
because telephone number restructuring is something that happens, and will
happen during the next 5 years because of the deregulation of the market.

They did see problems with the suggestion from you when the case happens
that one number changes area code (or the area code disappears like in
Denmark), i.e. that the base changes in the relative URL you are
describing. It is definitely not the case that the base changes from one to
another one the same way for several numbers at the same time. It is, to
use their wording, unlikely that the  base of phone numbers changes the
same for all numbers in the same base, even inside a country code like
Sweden.

According to them, each phone number is individual, is allocated in blocks
which have nothing to do with the area code or such, and each number is
also changed individually when they need to change.

It is also the case that some allocations (for example according to a
proposal for a "411"-service within the global 118 number series in Sweden,
which I think is stupid, but anyways) are hierarichal because of a
_postfix_ and not prefix. The format for this number is 118yxx, where y='0'
and y='5' is saved for national services, while the industry can ask for at
most two numbers in this series for national and international services.

Telephone industry is not at all the same as number allocation, which
happens on local level within each country, and in some cases also in
organizations like the EU.

    Patrik

Received on Tuesday, 30 June 1998 00:38:56 UTC