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Re: Appeal to the IAB on the site-local issue

2003-10-10 15:25:10
At 02:30 PM 10/10/2003, Leif Johansson wrote:
With all due respect, it seems that it would be beneficial for both camps (for and against SL) to hear, even now, the real concerns directly from the operation people and to let them participate in the decision themselves. ... <snip>

Been there. Done that. Didn't work. This vast Moral Majority of the Site-Locals either don't exist or live entierly behind NATs or other boxes which prevent them from receiving the call to arms to participate in the debate. ;-)

Let's at least try to be fair and realistic. There is a fairly large and vocal camp from tier 1 and tier 2 operators in the IETF which presumes that the needs of a backbone service provider are the only needs that are relevant in any network and go around blasting anything they don't need as "clueless". But not all tier 1/2 operators are represented or choose to speak publicly, and not all networks are tier 1/2 networks. I have a fairly long history of sitting in the room with people from certain tier 1/2 operators who will tell me at dinner or in the hallway what they think about this or that, but are precluded from speaking for themselves publicly by the policy or culture of their employers. I'm not naming names, because that would be inappropriate (if they can't/won't speak for themselves because their employer doesn't want to tip a business hand, who am I to tip it for them?). But I guarantee you that they are present, and they don't necessarily agree with the vocal operators.

When it comes to tertiary operators and enterprises, let's face it. They're vastly under-represented, and perhaps not at all represented. If they were represented as completely as the Tier 1/2 operators are, we would routinely have meetings with multiples of 10K attendees. They don't come to IETF meetings. They read about them in Network World and Computer Week, they tell their vendors what they are willing to buy, and their vendors come talk about the features smaller operators and enterprises are asking for. The vendors take a beating from the operational elite, who tell us

 - we have no clue how to run a network
 - we have no idea what features a network needs
 - there is no deployed (pick your protocol that is perhaps inappropriate in
   a Tier 1 backbone) in the whole wide world
 - Specifically, there is no operational deployment of the diffserv
architecture (having heard this extensively from the gentleman from Telstra, I wonder if he ever talks to the gentleman from Comindico that I spoke with
   last week; they seem to live on different planets)
 - That everything we produce and talk about is what we want to sell, not
   what the tier 1/2 operators or anybody else wants to buy.
 - That whatever we say is inherently invalid because we are vendors.

Interesting. Do we do these things for our health? Do we go generate features and then try to sell them to people? Do we keep beat our heads against the wall for a decade or more while there is no market and all problems are trivially solved using other technologies?

Are we that idiotic?

You know, I'd like to see a little more respect for people, and for the reports they make. Yes, it would be much better if operational staff from each of the Fortune 500 companies and larger tertiary operators came to the IETF and spoke for themselves. They don't, and that doesn't make their opinions or requirements irrelevant.