With the avenues for communication and our personal identities multiplying through channels such as Enum, Skype names, Google's GrandCentral and Facebook pages, the plain old phone number is in danger of becoming a poor proxy for indentifying people today.

Joel Fisher, vice president of marketing for Interconnection Solutions at Telcordia, will participate in a panel Monday morning (11:30 a.m.) at the VON Conference & Expo entitled, “What's In a Number? The Future of Dialing and Identifiers in the Mobile Universe.” He will join panelists Rodrigue Ullens, CEO of Voxbone, John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN and moderator Michael Oeth, CEO of Junction Networks to discuss how the telephone number can regain its place as the primary customer identifier. He spoke with VON prior to the event.

VON: Why did you choose to participate in the particular session at this particular conference?

Joel Fisher: The topic is very relevant to a lot of the activities we are working on in our interconnection group. Obviously, this is the first of the new VON shows and when we saw the mobile track, we felt it was a good fit in terms of what people are trying to do with IP networks, devices and applications that cross over onto the mobile side and we saw it as an important part of what is going on with the convergence story. A lot of what we do is in this overlap between operators and the content guys.

VON: What is it you are doing in this space?

JF: Telcordia recently launched a product initiative called Mobile ID. We are building out information that content providers and mobile operators use to deliver new services that are more targeted and relevant using the mobile phone number as essentially the first building block of what the user’s identity is. This includes what device or devices you have, functionality, location, etc. You can get real fancy in terms of preferences and profiles, but it’s the idea of people getting reached by their mobile phone number, whether it’s a content provider sending an SMS or some kind of content. Today they don’t have much information beyond the number itself, not even the network it’s associated with.

With our local number portability activity and history, we make sure a number can be associated with the proper network. But beyond that we are building up information around that mobile number that is useful to content providers and others to deliver services. On the panel we are speaking on “What is a mobile number” and we think it’s a lot. It’s not just a routing location, it’s actually the basis of a whole identity.

VON: Will users be able to port their identity along with their number?

JF: That’s one of the reasons we do what we do. We operate portability in a number of countries and they have different rules on how to expose that information, and porting creates more havoc for content providers and others trying to deliver content to that mobile phone. We started getting asked what else we could tell people about a number like what device they have or their location. That is from the roots of LNP.

VON: Is Telcordia trying to position itself as the administrator of customer identity through LNP?

JF: I would say it this way. One thing we do very well is represent a trusted third-party broker of information like we do with number portability. We operate clearing houses on behalf of government regulators so the operators can port numbers. Global identity is the same concept. Content providers are trying to reach those subscribers so we can in the spirit of a trusted third party, act as a proxy between operators and content providers and expose, under the right policies and privacy, information needed to make it easy for these parties to communicate without having to touch each other’s networks directly.