On Sep 13, 2006, at 8:43 AM, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 05:37:05 -0700 David Conrad <drc@virtualized.org> wrote:
I'm sure the same argument was used for telephone numbers when technical folk were arguing against number portability.
Oh come on. You know perfectly well that phone numbers are not the same as IP. No one knows me by my IP address. They know me by my email address(es). Heck, even I don't know my own IP address without running ifconfig and I installed it and maintain the system.
If we were still calling central and asking "Hi Mabel, can you put me through to Doc," no one would give a rat's ass about phone number portability. Notice that no one is getting worked up about circuit number portability.
In point of fact, phone numbers as David is describing them are much more of a parallel to DNS than to IP. BTNs (Billing Telephone Numbers) which are not portable are like IP addresses. The way the telephone system works is when you dial a number, it is looked up in the SS7 database and mapped to a BTN. The call is then routed based on that BTN to its destination, with the dialed number in the DNIS field and the BTN in the destination field. Much like an HTTP request to a virtual server. Owen