BYTE MARKS
Technology still seeking connections

By Burt Lum

Remember back in the mid-1990s when the wireless industry was all abuzz about PCS — personal communications service?

This service held the promise that everything would work seamlessly between your cordless phone, PDA, pager, cell phone and land line. You could roam from your home to another city and keep only one number. Mini PCS cell sites were going to pop up everywhere, from your neighborhood to the shopping center to the building you work in.

This never took off the way it was promoted. It's true we can take our cell phones nearly anywhere — and heaven forbid, even forward all our calls to it, whether on vacation or on business travel. But everything predicted did not come to pass.

The point is that, despite the hype and the technology, convergence and user preference take their own courses.

A new convergence theory is building around recent work by the Internet Engineering Task Force, setting up a one-stop location code called ENUM. ENUM takes your phone number, which includes your country code, area code and seven digit number (called the North American Numbering Plan in the United States), puts it in reverse order and append e164.arpa to the end of it. For example (808) 555-1212 would translate to 2.1.2.1.5.5.5.8.0.8.1.e164.arpa.

More detailed information is at www.itu.int/osg/spu/enum. You can read through a specific description of the service at www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2916.txt.

The promise is the ability to map your telephone number to the Internet, be that a Web site, an e-mail address or whatever.

The idea is that we should be able to type a 4-digit number on our mobile phone and interact directly with a Web site. Verisign is already piloting a service call WebNum (www.verisign-grs.com/webnum) that demonstrates this capability.

Critics of this service echo the same caution as with PCS: It's another way for the government to keep track of you. But as user preference and the variations are understood, I think it might even get harder to figure out who you are. ;-)

Burt Lum is a click away at burt@brouhaha.net.