There are currently unprecedented demands within the telecommunications industry for E.164 MSISDNs resources and these demands are expected to accelerate in the years to come. Accordingly, some countries and their national regulatory authorities have expressed concerns over the numbering requirements of new services involving Machine Type Communications (MTC) services and their expected rapid growth. MTC demand is forecast to grow from 50M connections to over 200M by 2013. A large number of these services are currently deployed over circuit-switched GSM architectures and therefore use E.164 MSISDNs although such services do not require 'dialable' numbers, and generally do not communicate with each other by human interaction. Without technical alternative to using public international numbering resources as addresses, and considering the current forecasts and pending applications for numbers made to numbering plan administration agencies, there is a significant risk that some national numbering/dialling plans will run out of numbers in the near future, which would impact not only these MTC services but also the GSM/UMTS service providers in general.

This document seeks to study and highlight the challenge of using the existing public numbering resources to support Machine Type Communication (MTC) services and proposes that 3GPP develop an alternative to using public numbering resources for MTC communications.