Development and Basis of International Telephone Numbering

摘要

This document describes the development and basis of InternationalTelephone Numbering as it has been manifested through theactivities and formal instruments of the InternationalConsultative Committee for Telephony (CCIF) and forums of theInternational Telecommunication Union (ITU). The currentpractices for International Telephony Numbering are currentlycontained in a more general instrument, the International PublicTelecommunication Numbering Plan, ITU-T Recommendation E.164(05/97).The historical record of this activity makes it clear that thebasis for telephone numbering has always been that of autonomoussovereign nations and their international public telephony serviceproviders cooperating among themselves to facilitate the routing ofcalls between their independent national telephony networks. Thishistorical record and basic instruments clearly contradict thenotion of a simple authoritative numbering namespace hierarchygoverned under the ITU and applied to all instantiations oftelephone numbers, such as ENUM-based identifier services in eitherdesignated or competitive DNS zones provided using the RFC2916protocol.