User:Munz007/Carrier ENUM

Carrier ENUM is a variety of ENUM service that is offered for inter-carrier communication for terminating a call or a message through the appropriate switch or SMSC or MMSC. Several companies provide this kind of service at varying levels. With exponential growth in mobile inter-carrier messaging including SMS and Multimedia Messaging Service(MMS), across multiple carriers, there is a tremendous amount of value added by resolving the destination of the phone message or a phone call as fast as possible in order to reduce costs and prevent Hot Potato Routing. Direct connect is not possible without an application which provides Carrier ENUM services since there is a lack of neutral central repository through which service providers can share data with their peering partners in a secure and controlled manner.

Increased adoption of mobile messaging can be attributed to the efforts of wireless operators and other industry players that expanded the reach of mobile messaging across operators and across countries. Operators have managed to increase their reach by employing inter-carrier message aggregators, or messaging hubs, to reach subscribers belonging to other operators. Inter-carrier hubs relay messages across carriers by accurately identifying the carrier that owns the destination number. Carrier ENUM services has played a critical role in making this possible, by accurately identifying the “carrier-of-record” of a given telephone number. In order to provide this service, Carrier ENUM service providers source number ownership data from a variety of sources, including regulatory bodies like NANPA and NPAC; source direct from carriers, resellers and the inter-carrier service providers.

In any typical Carrier ENUM system, the data is stored in a central registry where industry data from regulatory authorities such as NANPA and NPAC is overlaid with authoritative data from various carriers to derive the right routing information.

Sometimes mistakenly referred to as simply number portability, ENUM Carrier fulfills a role that is more complex by providing searchable access to a collection of telecom datasets, including: public portability records as well as private provider-specified records. Its existence is made necessary because for various reasons service providers need to register information that supplements information maintained by the regulated number portability administration center (NPAC). Thus, any Carrier ENUM is not just the portability corrected industry data, but also number ownership and routing data from
 * MVNO differentiating them from their dependent MNO
 * Several MVNO's choose to differentiate themselves by providing value added messaging features that require them to run their own SMSC/MMSC. The absence of incorrect routing will lead the messages to MNO and ultimately being dropped. Regulators did not envision, when establishing the NPAC, the need to track a number’s subsequent allocation to value-add reseller. In other words, the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) business model gave rise to the need to supplement portability information with reseller information.


 * Wholesale MNO
 * leasing their number blocks to another operator and this information is not reported to the industry data in NANPA and NPAC.


 * Operators after mergers and acquisition
 * where operators may choose to converge voice and messaging infrastructures separately, thus requiring messages to be routed differently from voice calls. If this complexity is not made known to the rest of the industry inter-carrier calls or messages will not arrive at the subscriber.


 * Service providers
 * The most striking feature of any Carrier ENUM Registry is that it provides a modern method of sharing information between service provider networks. Once a network change in one administrative domain is uploaded it is immediately made known to peered networks thus giving accurate routing information and reduces the number of messages being dropped.


 * Emerging Operators who are not affiliated with just one network
 * at any given time, all the numbers by such operators will have to be resolved to the correct underlying operator and that data is provisioned to any Carrier ENUM Registry.


 * Broadband/over the top service providers
 * These are typically landline phones with messaging enabled for them. The inter-carrier hubs need to recognize them accordingly as message capable instead of dropping the messages. These providers provision data to the Carrier ENUM for this purpose.