[asterisk-users] Re: Open CallerID Database?

[Anselm Martin Hoffmeister]

Am Dienstag, den 20.02.2007, 16:33 -0700 schrieb Natambu Obleton:
> I would guess that registration would be by the telco for the blocks
> just like with reverse dns today, so then each telco would have a
> local server to manage their 'reverse' cnam lookup.... and the people
> in charge would be NANPA, just like how ARIN is regulated today.
> Although who owns the root namservers.. I wonder if ARIN and RIPE
> share ownership of them?
> 
> Although now that i Think about it dns wouldn't work because want to
> deligate .. XXX-XXX-XYYY and XXX-XXX-XXYY and then there is single
> numbers. For that right now I do weird PTR CNAME to A record thing for
> single reverse dns. This would be little larger... ohh shit.. LNP. So
> now Qwest would need to deligate a single CNAM to me and crap..naw
> this will never work.

I do not get your point here.

Take ENUM. A made-up phone number like +49 (228) 91234567 would be found
as
7.6.5.4.3.2.1.9.8.2.2.9.4.enum-something

This means, you delegate the 2.1.9.8.2.2.9.4.enum-something to the telco
that owns the 912 block in Bonn, Germany. 

Number portability screws this, as even single numbers out of a
contiguous range of MSNs on a ISDN line can be moved over to another
provider, with the others staying with the old provider. They would have
to play well together, and that will "fubar" for sure (they even
sometimes "block" the DSL frequencies on lines when a customer moves to
another company, with "unblocking" taking a 14-day security period,
"because they can" - there is no technical block, but the DSLAM
manipulation database software will mark your DSL line as blocked,
making moving to another provider a pain with up to 6 weeks without
internet).

In Germany we have an agency that manages all phone book data, and
(nearly?) all the 411 type services (called 118xx here) buy data there.
How they manage their data internally is none of my business (although I
would guess it's something like MSSQL with an Access frontend, thinking
about the Deutsche Telekom ;-).

They will no way accept DNS-type queries for free. Some months ago,
there was a heise.de (German IT newsticker) article about them charging
enourmous sums, paying the real data storage and administration costs
back by about factor 5 or so. Well-paying businesses rarely give away
their business turnpoint.

Any non-official system will suffer even worse inaccuracy than the
providers' own and managed system (as someone else already wrote). Their
data is quite bad enough. This relates, of course, to the fact that they
may only reverse-lookup numbers to find names if the customer
explicitely allowed them to do it, on the line rental agreement. There
are usually several checkboxes, allowing you to "get listed in
phonebook", "get listed in digital listings", and "get listed for
reverse lookup".

For those who allow it there is a free web-frontend to reverse-lookup
numbers, which is a pain to script-access, but it is possible. It
suffers from problems with DIDs, as for example a shop might have the
number 94144-0, and assigned the numbers up to 94144-29. If you try to
lookup 9414488 (which might be a private person's analogue line, and
this is absolutely valid in the German numbering system) it will return
the wrong entry because the logic in their webinterface always assumes
that 94144-0 means all numbers starting 94144- belong to that line.
_That_ really sucks - you think business and then it's a friend calling
for private talk.

Just out of interest: From former posts I understood that there is a
CALLERID service in US (for an extra fee, I assume) that gives both
number _and_ name of the caller...? I am aware of the fact that e.g.
EuroISDN lines can transmit alphanumeric callerid (and in fact I already
use that on an ISDN phone here that connects to an Asterisk - showing a
few "special" names like "wakeup call"). Not for names yet, as I was too
lazy to implement that. Does that also work over analogue lines?

BR
Anselm