Telecom Informer

    

by The Prophet

Hello, and greetings from the Central Office!

I'm writing in a place located just two blocks away from Maidan Square, the heart of the bloody Euromaidan protests that deposed Viktor Yanukovych - for the second time - in 2014.  Yanukovych, now living under Russian protection, is perhaps the only leader who has been deposed by two separate revolutions on two separate occasions.  He was a loyal servant of the Kremlin, though, steering Ukraine firmly into Moscow's orbit during his tenure.  The only problem was that almost (((nobody))) in the country actually wanted this.  It was, after all, why they became an independent country after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

And what a time that was.  On December 26, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev formally resigned as the leader of the Soviet Union, and translations engineers all over the world groaned.  Translations are complicated enough when a single country splits in two, like Sudan and South Sudan.  However, the Soviet Union split into all of its individual component republics, consisting of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.  And, of course, Russia.  Think of this as something akin to Canada fragmenting into nations consisting of all of its component provinces, China doing the same, or the United States splitting up into 15 different regions.  Practically overnight, 15 new countries were created and, while their relationships with Moscow were friendly on paper, it quickly became apparent that they had very different interests.  One of the most key interests was in maintaining control over telecommunications infrastructure.

As it turns out, when you create a new country, even though borders can change on paper overnight, telecommunications networks don't.  Here in the United States, fiber routes don't respect state borders.  In fact, they don't necessarily even respect international boundaries - the most direct route to Michigan from northern New York is via Ontario, and a lot of (technically) domestic U.S. traffic crosses that fiber.  It has been reported that the NSA has used this to their advantage, particularly when it comes to Internet traffic.  Telecommunications networks route calls to toll centers, perform translations, and further route calls internationally as needed.  Naturally, it doesn't work for Moldova (for either logistical or national security reasons) when the nearest toll center is in Lviv, Ukraine.

It gets even more complicated than that.

In addition to the need to split up physical infrastructure, there is a need to adjust logical infrastructure.  This begins with country codes.  Things are different these days, where international calls are often routed by VoIP directly to the terminating carrier.  Back in the 1990s, however, international calls would typically route via the national carrier of each country, designated the "primary telecommunications carrier."  In the U.S., this was AT&T, in Canada it was Bell Canada, and in Russia it was the Ministry of Communications of the USSR (although it's worthy of note that the city of Moscow's phone company, Moscow City Telephone Company, operated semi-independently and continues to operate as its own rate center).

So, if you placed a call from, say, Japan to the U.S. - no matter which long distance carrier in Japan you used (NTT or KDD for example), the call would route via KDDI (KDD's international long distance arm) to AT&T because this is effectively how the two countries peered with each other.  However, the Soviet Union was pretty much all one entity as far as the rest of the world was concerned.  Carriers everywhere in the world were set up to route calls via Moscow, and drop them off with the Ministry of Communications (which made very limited circuits available for international calls, a huge pain point - there were only a handful of circuits available to the United States, and calls to the Soviet Union had to be operator-assisted and previously scheduled).

Russia opted to retain the country code previously assigned to the Soviet Union: +7.

This made sense because the largest number of phone numbers in service were allocated to this country code.  The first puzzle piece allowing calls to be routed more directly was the creation of separate country codes for each of the newly independent republics (save Kazakhstan, which opted to remain within the +7 country code), and translations allowing calls to, say, Tallinn to be routed directly to the newly-created Eesti Telekom.

This was actually a massive amount of work, which fell to the CCITT and, later, its successor U.N.-umbrella organization, the ITU (it's worth noting that the fallout of the Soviet breakup is still not over - telecommunications remain in flux in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, and may also change in Kazakhstan).  The CCITT was an international organization dedicated to defining telecommunications standards, among them international country code assignments.  And as it turns out, this is a very politically sticky thing.  Country codes are not only needed for technical reasons, but they're also an assertion of country names and boundaries.  It's a uniquely complicated role in world affairs because country code assignments need to reflect not just the engineering needs of making calls correctly route (and bill, which we're very particular about here in the Central Office), but also satisfy non-engineering constituencies.

Country code assignments are relatively straightforward with the ITU.

Countries can apply for one after formal recognition of their nation-state status with the U.N.  This came relatively quickly in the case of former Soviet satellite states, since their status was never disputed.  However, it has never come in the case of Taiwan.  And yet Taiwan has the country code +886.  This speaks to the delicate boundary that the ITU must straddle between the engineering needs of maintaining a functioning telephone network and the inherent politicization of the process.

For some time, Taiwan maintained a self-assigned +866, which was initially recognized by the CCITT, then later revoked.  Eventually, with the agreement of mainland China, +886 was assigned.  However, for many years it was assigned in a "reserved" status, which wasn't formally assigned by the ITU and therefore didn't require the ITU to make a statement on whether it considered Taiwan to be part of China (this changed in 2006, when Taiwan was formally assigned +886 and listed by the ITU as a province of China).

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (a.k.a., North Cyprus) provides another example of how the ITU handles telephone assignments.  In the case of North Cyprus, the U.N. hasn't formally recognized their independence and they are disconnected from the main part of Cyprus by an U.N.-patrolled DMZ.  Substantially all of their telecommunications route through Turkey and, accordingly, they operate using the +90 country code for Turkey, with a specially assigned area code.

The elephant in the room is probably the +1 country code.

Fully 24 countries and territories operate within it, of which 19 are outside of the United States.  The United States is one of the world's only cases of consolidating country codes (a story for another column), because some of the outlying territories now included in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) were previously assigned country codes.  A lot of this is historical - the U.S. invented the telephone, after all, and connected a lot of its neighboring countries before anyone got around to figuring out whether there should be such a thing as the U.N. or an agency that takes care of country code assignments.  The next-largest "break-up" of a major numbering block - rivaling the work that was done to fully disintegrate the Soviet Union - may well be the North American Numbering Plan.

And with that, it's time to get back to work.

The (((government of Ukraine))), the same one that has covered a major building in Maidan Square with banners that say "Freedom Is Our Religion!" has us busy blocking access to Russian payment processing networks and social networking sites.  They're building the same kinds of Internet surveillance and Internet filtering as every other government in the world, nearly all of whom put the (((Soviet Union))) to shame in their surveillance capabilities.

I hope Ukrainians enjoy their newfound "freedom," and I hope you have a safe and productive summer.

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