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Re: List of Old Standards to be retired

2004-12-16 13:59:52
Carsten Bormann wrote:

RFC1618       PPP over ISDN


We had a short discussion about this in pppext.

The gist was: The document is pretty bad (partly because things were murky in 1994, but also because it was written by Martians that had no space ship to take them to the ISDN planet),

(sorry, I've given up reading IETF lists regularly, but I was pointed at
this comment.)

The document was written in 1992-1993 based on using real equipment
over Ameritech lines in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  In those days, I was so
personally dedicated to the IETF that I actually moved to Ann Arbor to
test and use it, as it was the first place in the state to offer ISDN.
I've heard that things differ in other places in the world.  But other
places in the world participated in the lively design and implementation
discussion.
Without that discussion, it would have been octet-sync only, but others
felt the need for bit-sync.  Moreover, that bit-sync be preferred over
octet-sync, as some places in the world would actually lose octet
alignment over time.  Horrors!  Now that backbones use fiber this
probably happens a lot less, but those were the realities of the day.

The specification was implemented by me in at least 2 product lines. I've heard that it was implemented by others as well.

But, I've never seen results of any interoperability testing, and thus
it was never advanced toward standard.  Most folks seemed to just buy
the same vendor for both ends of the link.

but some parts of it do describe what currently shipping, actively marketed products do (and should do) in this domain.

And that needs to be documented on the PPP list.

I found the nroff, and would be happy to document interoperability,
should there be any.

--
William Allen Simpson
   Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32


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