Comments: On Number Portability

Completely agree that a true emergency back-up system is needed, as described by Stuart, Tom, etc. And of course it needs the portability, speed, and flexibility that VoIP offers. However, we need to interwork with the legacy PSTN infrastructure, particularly LNP.

The problem with LNP is that it relies on traditional carrier SS7 infrastructure. The response to an LNP query is an LRN - the LRN identifies the switch to which the number has been ported to. However, most VoIP carriers probably do not have switches with associated LRNs, especially if they are pure IP telephony w/o PSTN gateways.

A possible solution is a VoIP network that is routed to by a pre-defined LRN (emergency LRN). When there is an emergency, the carrier with affected local lines knows to (mandated to?) instantly mark their affected switches as ported to the emergency LRN. Call requests for the ported lines then go to distributed IP telephony servers, making them accessible to people at any IP address with a little bit of engineering. Going a step further, account mapping could be done ahead of time, so that users can instantly be authorized/authenticated on to the emergency VoIP system, as soon as they can get online, contact lists could be built ahead of time, etc.

GZ

Posted by GZ at October 7, 2005 06:23 PM