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Re: the iab & net neutrality

2006-04-05 07:15:22

On Mar 29, 2006, at 10:56 AM, Henning Schulzrinne wrote:

We could ask the IEEE, since the relationship between the WiFi folks and IEEE 802.11 seems to be somewhat similar.

One of the problems I see is that many of the industry associations (SIP Forum, IPv6 forum, to name two I'm somewhat familiar with) tend to focus on service providers, not consumers. But an organization such as the SIP Forum could provide a "VoIP-optimized" label for NAT boxes and maybe even ISPs.
I'm a board member of the SIP Forum, so I'd like to respond to Henning. (I'm speaking as an individual here who happens to be on the SIP Forum board so these are personal views neither discussed with nor agreed to by the rest of the board. Ditto for the IAB.)

The SIP Forum is a creature of our members, which today are almost exclusively service providers and equipment vendors. We try to respond to the pain points they bring us and add value by bridging the gap between protocol standardization through the IETF and needs in the market. So far, we've been pretty successful at running interoperability testing through the SIPIT program, and coming up with deployment and "feature bundling" specifications in areas like hooking up SIP-based enterprise VoIP systems to service providers who are offering PSTN origination and termination services.

The question of how to help the consumer market segment is one we are stumped on, for a number of reasons. First, there is no obvious advocate for the needs of consumers among our membership. Second, few to none of the vendors who sell consumer gear (e.g. Linksys, Netgear, Sony, Apple) are members. Third, much of that market segment is driven by offshore manufacturers who have little incentive to lead in engineering. Their expertise is in channel and brand management, and in minimizing all costs, including engineering (not to mention forum memberships...).

That said, a number of us believe that we are having a modest effect. For example, in the enterprise interconnect specification, we worked very hard to make sure straightforward interconnect worked without mandating extra firewall, NAT or B2BUA functionality.

The idea of having the SIP Forum sponsor work to at least partially drain the NAT/firewall traversal swamp is a good one. So - seeing as this is on the IETF public list, let me offer a plea: if you work with or build SIP products for consumers, JOIN THE SIP FORUM and help us put together a program in our Technical Working Group to address these issues. We are driven by our members. Membership is free for individuals and of modest cost for companies.


Cheers, Dave Oran

Thus, I think we need a separate organization (or work with a separate organization) that does branding and certification. It's hard to buy a non-WiFi device in stores today; the equivalent consumer assurance needs to be true for core consumer and small- business network devices, and possibly services.
I don't know how this would work, but if it could be made to work, that might be very helpful.

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