Summary

  • ITU-T Study Group 2 says its consultation about closing Public ENUM was informational. Its revised procedure handles non-operational country-code delegations individually.
  • The Telecommunication Standardization Bureau contacts the country concerned. After 60 days without a reply, it may tell RIPE NCC that the broken delegation can be withdrawn; no public case list establishes that a withdrawal has happened.

A broken branch of e164.arpa now has an address for the complaint and a clock for the answer. It no longer has to stand in for a referendum on the whole tree. That is the practical result of the September meeting of ITU-T Study Group 2, explained again by RIPE NCC managing director Hans Petter Holen at RIPE 93 on 28 October.

The story began with an unusually large question for an operational problem. ITU-T's Circular 123 asked Member States about possible closure of the ENUM system, which maps telephone numbers into the Domain Name System. The September meeting summary records the chair's correction: the circular sought information; it was no binding ballot to shut Public ENUM. ITU, the Internet Architecture Board and RIPE NCC keep their existing roles.

The new route is narrower and more consequential for a broken delegation. Under ITU's published interim procedure, RIPE NCC can report a country-code branch whose nameservers no longer work or a temporary delegation that has expired. The TSB contacts the Member State and asks for its position. If no answer arrives within 60 days, the TSB may notify RIPE NCC that the non-operational branch can be withdrawn. The clock belongs to that country's case, not to the entire e164.arpa zone.

That arrangement puts three different jobs in three different hands. RIPE NCC operates the zone and checks technical setup under instructions from the IAB, as its ENUM service page explains. TSB carries the official country contact and approval channel. The Member State can respond about its own code. A DNS test is evidence of a fault; the TSB notice is the handoff that can authorize removal. The procedure also lets a country request insertion again later through the ordinary route.

In the RIPE 93 Services transcript, Holen said roughly half the delegations were fully working and that cleanup remained. His estimate echoes the older RIPE NCC inventory; it is no new October census. He also said the ITU-T group had agreed the internal procedures for operators that did not answer or keep service current. The August Theo March report on 23 troubled delegations covered the proposal while that step was pending. September supplied the decision path.

The September summary assigns work, too. TSB will ask countries that favoured continuing ENUM to explain their potential country-code use; TSB and RIPE NCC will use a list of troubled delegations to find contacts and decide whether each branch can be repaired or deleted. That is a real test of the procedure: a country can answer, a nameserver can be fixed, and a failed contact can be recorded. The public record has not yet named a branch withdrawn under this path or published the individual notice dates. A case log showing a TSB contact, the 60-day response window and RIPE NCC's ensuing change would settle that question.

Sources: ITU-T September meeting summary, ITU interim procedure, RIPE 93 Services transcript, RIPE NCC ENUM operations.