CIO's today in the air transport industry must make wise spending decisions and provide strategic direction that improve productivity, efficiency and deliver better customer service. The .aero domain, with its strong policy framework, versatility and focus on the aviation community provides excellent leverage for the continued growth of the industry's technology solutions. Afilias Global Registry Services, the technology provider for the .aero domain, is expanding its service offering to include support for ENUM and RFID services for the aviation community.

SITA's 2005 survey shows that 75% of airports will have invested in and deployed an airport-wide communication network to support new services such as VoIP by 2007. ENUM services, which route telephone calls through existing Internet connections, have the added benefit of providing secure and private Voice over IP (VoIP) networks without a significant hit on the capital or operating budget. For example, contact information for each individual can be stored in hierarchical order within the ENUM database, providing a virtual telephone exchange with each ENUM identifier.  Since airlines have already heavily invested in purchasing IP networks, they can leverage these networks to implement private VoIP systems using ENUM, and ultimately realize savings in long distance costs between members of their network. Using ENUM as a central database can also help in the initial transition period, as it is capable of keeping track of whether the caller is using a traditional or VoIP PBX.

The global coordination of rules developed for each national numbering system has often been a roadblock in implementing ENUM seamlessly.  As a global top level domain under the full control of aviation community, .aero  is in control of its naming conventions and can facilitate faster deployment of ENUM, for the benefit of its community.

RFID and its associated services have been the subject of a lot of attention of late. From Afilias' perspective, RFID solutions, especially those that are shared by the utilization of service providers, hide the complexity and reduce the cost of deploying RFID with a community standpoint. Many companies are starting to use RFID tags for asset tracking and inventory management. RFID related services, such as EPCIS Discovery Services, will permit partners of supply chains to locate one another and securely exchange relevant data surrounding RFID tagged products. Currently under development, EPCIS Discovery Services aims to be a standards compliant and globally available system that enables other existing RFID services. EPCIS Discovery Services that will be offered by Afilias will provide individual networks that companies can implement outside of the broader EPC global network to connect their specific member partners across their own RFID network.

Afilias is a pioneer in the development of next-generation registry technology and has specialized in globally available database and DNS operations since its founding in 2000 by a group of industry leading domain name registrars. Afilias has been the first to launch many registry technologies such as a gTLD registry based on the newest registry standard, Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), and was the first registry to implement an RFC-standards compliant Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) solution.

Afilias is continually investing in R&D needed to support technology enhancements and extendable lines of business. In 2004 it successfully operated the pilot ENUM registry for Ireland.  Its technical experts participate actively in many standards organizations such as ICANN, the IETF, the W3C , and the EPC Global EPCIS Discovery Services Working Group. Afilias believes in contributing to development of standards needed for better and more reliable and advanced global information technologies. Afilias is keen to build on its expertise and support SITA and the air transport community  to implement specialized solutions in VoIP (ENUM) and RFID, for more information contact Afilias at auto-id@afilias.info or visit www.afilias.info/ads.

This article was written and submitted by Afilias Global Registry Services

-- Afilias Global Registry Services (www.afilias.info) supports more than 7 million Internet domains including .info, .org, .aero,. mobi, and many country code domains, and offers private RFID and ENUM registry services customized for industry verticals such as the air transport industry.