The Swiss city of Geneva hosted from 6 December to 15 December a meeting of Study Group 2 (SG2) of the ITU Standardisation Sector (ITU-T), which leads studies on definitions of services, numbering, routing and overall mobility.
The most relevant theme topics under discussion were as the following:
- European Telephony Numbering Space (ETNS) ? international code +3883;
- E.152 (international freephone service);
- E.910 (procedures for registration within the domain ?.int?);
- E.353 (routing of calls when using international network routing addresses);
- SOS by SMS (written message) ? proposed code +979 0 767;
- E.156 (E.misuse) (procedures to determine ITU action on reported misuse of E.164 number resources);
- E.212 (the international identification plan for mobile terminals and mobile users).
Issues associated to the misuse of E.164 and E.212 numbering are particularly noteworthy. The former led the Telecommunications Standardisation Bureau (TSB) to distribute a note with a view to identifying such situations, in order to help find international solutions for the problem, which is usually fraudulent. As for SIM (subscriber identification module) commercialisation with mobile country codes (MCC) outside the country initially assigned the code by ITU-T, a note should soon be sent to the ITU-T members to ascertain which international uses are not in line with recommendation E.212.
