North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Can a customer take IP's with them?

  • From: Howard C. Berkowitz
  • Date: Thu Jun 24 11:26:33 2004 
At 7:29 PM -0400 6/23/04, Robert Blayzor wrote:

Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:
This would absolutely have to be challenged on cross-examination. Were I the attorney, especially if the plaintiff had mentioned telephone number portability, I would ask the plaintiff to explain what additional work had to be done to the POTS network to implement portability. Should the plaintiff start mumbling, I'd impugn his credibility, and then ask a bunch of hard questions about SS7 (including the TCAP mechanism for portable number translation), how IP routing works, how IP routing has no authoritative mechanism for global translation, etc. I'd interrogate the customer about DNS and why they weren't able to solve their portability requirement with it. I'd look for detailed familiarity with RFC 2071 and 2072.

I wouldn't expect the customer to be able to answer many of these. As the defendant, I would expect to bring in my own expert witness who is very good at explaining these differences, and how the telephone and IP routing environments are different.
Apples and Oranges.
My point exactly, that enough explanation will show there is no operational or protocol equivalent to number portability. The defendant has to be prepared to shoot down that argument.

There is something called DNS which handles how hosts are "known" by. The whole reason behind DNS is so a user owns a name but doesn't matter what "number" they have.
Well, yes.

In the telco world you do not have this option since many businesses advertise their telephone number. (ie: yellow page ads, business cards, advertisements, etc.) When it comes to "the net" IP addresses are irrelevant as people are known by name, names which are transparently resolved to IP addresses.

The technology exists so that people don't have to bring IP space with them. The routing tables are big enough as it is and the last thing we need is a bunch of judges comparing number portability to IP space portability.
Again, I don't see how we are in disagreement. What I was describing was an approach to getting the judge and/or jury to see they are NOT the same thing.