Speaking of Standards

Only one month to go before the 75th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 75) begins on Monday, July 27, in Stockholm, Sweden. The latest draft of the meeting agenda is available and authors are busy updating their Internet-Drafts in advance of the looming publication cut-off dates.

Unfortunately, with everything else going on in my life (new job role here at Voxeo, new child, etc.), I am not planning to travel there to be in the face-to-face meetings. Once again, I’ll be participating remotely via streaming audio and Jabber chat rooms… although the 6 hours time difference from US Eastern will definitely prove to be a bit challenging.

I expect I won’t be alone in being remote, especially given current economic times and travel budgets within the industry in general. Hopefully the IETF will make available the “HTML-ized” agenda like the one available for IETF 74 - http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/74/ - that so nicely brought together all the links to relevant Internet drafts, Jabber rooms, etc. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, if you are going to Stockholm, I wish you all the best for your travel. I’ve never been to Stockholm but the pictures on the http://www.ietf75.se/ site and links from there do make it look intriguing to visit.

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Technorati Tags: IETF, standards, stockholm

I had a moment of amusement yesterday when I received an email announcing the location of the IETF 86 meeting. It began:

The IAOC is pleased to announce Orlando, Florida as the site for IETF 86…

Now, given that Voxeo’s corporate headquarters is right in Orlando, my immediate thought was “Excellent! A number of us will easily be able to attend!” And then I read on and laughed:

… from 10 - 15 March 2013.

2013, eh? These days it seems the timeframe my brain is thinking in is measured in days, weeks and months… and in some cases a year out… but four years? That seems like an eternity in the high tech world in which we live.

Now the IETF does plan out its future meetings a long time in advance, and in this particular case the email references lining up with another standards organization (the IEEE):

This meeting is scheduled to follow the IEEE 802 meeting being held 3 - 8 March 2013 at the same venue. The meeting was coordinated by the parties to benefit participants who attend both meetings and to achieve cost savings.

So I commend the IETF on setting the dates so that this all lines up for those who participate in both…. and, four years from now, I do look forward to participating in that IETF 86 meeting right in Orlando. P.S. At least they picked a great time of year to be in Florida! (Versus, say, July…)

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Technorati Tags: orlando, ietf

Last November, Skype announced that they were seeking a someone to head up the Skype Developer Community program. I wrote about this over on my DisruptiveTelephony blog and Jim Courtney wrote a more detailed piece on his Voice on the Web site. Jim quoted - and agreed with - my statement:

For those of us watching the emerging communication/telephony space, we’ve seen Skype make several different attempts over the years to create a successful developer program. Given their incredible user base and platform, it’s been curious to see that they haven’t yet found the right formula.

Skype has tried several times to create a strong developer program. In fact, we here at Voxeo were part of one of the first early attempts, their “Voice Services” program back in 2005 which eventually faded away. We still are huge fans of Skype, use it heavily internally and are very pleased that we are able to provide inbound Skype connections to voice applications on our platform. We want Skype to succeed.

So I was immensely pleased when, a bit over a month ago, Skype announced that they were hiring CounterPath CTO Jason Fischl as their Director of Developer Relations to head up their Developer Program, among other tasks. Through my work in the IETF and meeting at various events, Jason and I have become friends and so I was personally thrilled for him to step into this role. He is a smart guy with great communication skills. His work as CTO of CounterPath, arguably the largest provider of softphones out there (probably mostly known for X-Lite, but producer of many others), has given him a great view into softphone technology. And through all that, he has a wealth of connections into the developer community. Hiring Jason was a great move on Skype’s part.

What is interesting to look at from a standards point-of-view, though, is that in the hiring of Jason, Skype also imported some solid and current SIP-related credentials. Jason has been very active in the real-time communication area of the IETF - the area that deals with the SIP protocol - and has been involved in many of the IETF working groups in the area.

In fact, he is currently one of the co-chairs of the Basic Level of Interoperability for SIP Services (BLISS) Working Group whose aim it is to facilitate basic interoperability between SIP endpoints (hardphones, softphones, etc.). Primarily BLISS is aiming to solve the issue that SIP allows multiple ways to do things (such as signal “Do Not Disturb”) and different vendors have implemented different mechanisms. BLISS is trying to help make the interop cleaner. The working group is also where some cool new work like a RESTful API for automated call handling is being developed.

Jason is also the lead author on the Internet-Draft about using Secure RTP over DTLS, which has been identified as “the way forward” for establishing secure, encrypted media sessions between SIP endpoints to replace today’s reliance on ’sdescriptions’. (After a lengthy series of meetings/discussions and something like 13 other proposals including Phil Zimmermann’s ZRTP.) Assuming Jason continues his IETF work and this document proceeds to becoming an RFC, there will be an amusing bit of irony to have the IETF’s main method for secure media co-authored by someone at the proprietary Skype. (Although in truth Skype has a huge SIP backend infrastructure for PSTN connectivity.)

Jason is also the editor of a highly-regarded draft on a certificate management system for SIP and has been involved with a number of other drafts. All in all he’s got very solid SIP credentials and background in open standards and open source. He’s a good guy to have at Skype and I certainly wish him all the best on coming up with Skype’s nth Developer Program. We look forward to seeing how it evolves (and seeing how we can work with the folks at Skype).

Not that I’m setting high expectations or anything… okay, Jason?

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Technorati Tags: skype, jasonfischl, developers, sip, ietf

What are the components of a “peer-to-peer (P2P)” network? What are the different types currently available? When does it make sense to consider using a P2P architecture?

Given the intense amount of interest in P2P networking these days, the Internet Architecture Board recently came out with a new Internet-Draft, draft-iab-p2p-archs, on “Peer-to-peer (P2P) Architectures” that aims to help provide answers to these types of questions. Here’s the introduction:

P2P (Peer-to-peer) systems have received a great deal of attention in the last few years. A large number of scientific publications investigate different aspects of P2P systems, several scientific conferences explicitly focus on P2P networking, and there is an IRTF (Internet Research Task Force) Research Group (RG) on P2P systems (the Peer-to-Peer RG). There are also several commercial and non- commercial applications that use P2P principles running on the Internet. Some of these P2P applications are among the most widely used applications on the Internet at present.

However, despite all the above, engineers designing systems or developing protocol specifications do not have a common understanding of P2P systems. More alarming is the fact that many people in the telecom and datacom industries believe that P2P is synonymous with illegal activity, such as the illegal exchange of content over the Internet or P2P botnets.

The goal of this document is to discuss the tradeoffs involved in deciding whether a particular application can be best designed and implemented using a P2P paradigm or a different model (e.g., a client-server paradigm). The document also aims to provide architectural guidelines to assist in making such decisions. This document provides engineers with a high-level understanding of what defines a P2P system, what types of P2P systems exist, the characteristics that can be expected from such systems, and what types of applications can be implemented using P2P technologies. Such understanding is essential in order to appreciate the tradeoffs referred to above. In addition, we stress the importance of the fact that P2P systems can be used to implement perfectly legitimate applications and business models by providing several examples throughout the document.

Given my own long-standing personal interest in P2P networks (some of which I’ve written about here), I was pleased to see this document come out. Anything that helps improve the overall understanding out there of P2P systems is, in my opinion, a good thing.

The draft is still undergoing some revisions (and I know the authors would welcome further comments) and I believe a new version will be coming out soon. The latest version should always be able to be found at:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-p2p-archs

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The Internet Engineering Task Force announced today that registration is now open for the IETF 75 meeting taking place July 26-31, 2009, in Stockholm, Sweden. The IETF meeting page has all sorts of information about the event. The local host of the meeting, “.SE”, also has a site devoted to IETF 75 that has some great photos of Stockholm and goes into what is there in the city to do.

Between my new role here at Voxeo and more importantly the impending birth in my family, I’m not yet sure whether I will be making the journey over to Sweden or participating in IETF 75 remotely. We shall see.

In any event, for those of you who are able to go, you can now register.

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Technorati Tags: IETF, IETF75, sweden, standards, stockholm

We weren’t the only ones with April Fool’s Day posts, of course, and the web was littered with them last week. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) continued its very long tradition of participating (who can forget RFC 1149, IP over Avian Carriers?), although their 2009 contributions didn’t get out on the web until the evening of April 1, so many may have missed the pieces. They were:

• RFC 5513 - IANA Considerations for Three Letter Acronyms

• RFC 5514 - IPv6 over Social Networks

RFC 5513 suggests that because of the confusion with TLAs, IANA should create a registry for TLAs. Here is the abstract:

Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) are commonly used to identify components of networks or protocols as designed or specified within the IETF. A common concern is that one acronym may have multiple expansions. While this may not have been an issue in the past, network convergence means that protocols that did not previously operate together are now found in close proximity. This results in contention for acronyms, and confusion in interpretation. Such confusion has the potential to degrade the performance of the Internet as misunderstandings lead to misconfiguration or other operating errors.

Given the growing use of TLAs and the relatively small number available, this document specifies a Badly Construed Proposal (BCP) for the management of a registry of TLAs within the IETF, and the procedures for the allocation of new TLAs from the registry.

Linguists and others who are find language amusing or interesting may enjoy the full document.

RFC 5514 also confronts a daunting issue, namely the low adoption of IPv6, and suggests that the solution is to route IPv6 across social networks and in particular Facebook:

There is a lack of IPv6 utilization in early 2009; this is partly linked to the fact that the number of IPv6 nodes is rather low. This document proposes to vastly increase the number of IPv6 hosts by transforming all Social Networking platforms into IPv6 networks. This will immediately add millions of IPv6 hosts to the existing IPv6 Internet. This document includes sections on addressing and transport of IPv6 over a Social Network. A working prototype has been developed.

The amusing part is that some folks actually did write a prototype Facebook application. Fun, fun, fun…

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Technorati Tags: IETF, april1, aprilfools, facebook, ipv6

Last Friday afternoon, the 74th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) drew to a close in San Francisco. It was quite an interesting meeting on a number of levels and while I was not there in person, I was following along on the live audio streams, Jabber chat rooms and mailing lists. I’ll be writing up some of my thoughts over the next few days.

Right now, though, I thought I’d point out to those of you following along where you can find resources to understand what went on at IETF 74. Basically all info from the IETF meetings is online, at pointers such as:

• IETF 74 Agenda - links to working group agendas and drafts associated with the groups. The logs for the Jabber chat rooms are also available as one of the icons in the line next to each timeslot.

• Presentation materials - the slides used in the various presentations and links to the minutes for each meeting. (Minutes are only now starting to appear and more will be added over the next few weeks as working group minutes are submitted.)
• Audio file archive - MP3 recordings of all sessions… but you definitely need to reference the IETF 74 Agenda to find the room and session that you want to hear.

With those links, you should be able to explore all parts of the IETF 74 meeting.

Now the work of the IETF moves back online into the many, many mailing lists for the next few months. The next face-to-face meeting will be IETF 75 in Stockholm, Sweden, July 26-31, 2009. The hosts of the meeting are “.SE” and they have put together a website at http://www.ietf75.se/ that talks all about Stockholm, the meeting venue, travel, etc. I have not been to Stockholm for past meetings, and I’m not yet sure if I am going to this one this year, but I’ve heard from folks who have gone that it is quite an amazing city. After that it’s on to Hiroshima, Japan, in November 2009 and on to other cities after that…

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Technorati Tags: IETF, SIP, standards

Yesterday Skype announced the beta program for “Skype For SIP“, a new service that allows some forms of SIP connectivity between a premise-based SIP server/IP-PBX and Skype’s cloud and the PSTN. Over the weekend I put together a very lengthy post on my external DisruptiveTelephony blog that goes into the service in great detail, but the net of it is that when you sign up for the “Skype For SIP” service, you will be able to:

• Receive inbound calls to your SIP server from Skype users.
• Receive inbound calls to “Online Numbers” (formerly “SkypeIn”) that are routed to your SIP server.
• Place outbound calls to PSTN phone numbers using what was called “SkypeOut” and at Skype’s cheap rates.

The calls from Skype users are free to all involved. The Online Numbers only cost you $60 per year and the outbound calls are at Skype’s various rates.

The program, at www.skypeforsip.com, is accepting applications into the beta program now. Skype isn’t clear on when it will leave beta, but is clear that they will be evolving the program over the next weeks and months.

Note that what you are NOT able to do is to place calls from your SIP server to Skype users. So the interaction with Skype clients is one way - you can receive calls from Skype clients but not call those (at least not yet). As IfByPhone CEO Irv Shapiro notes in his blog post, Skype also has the “Skype For Asterisk” service available in a beta form and it does provide two-way connectivity to Skype users.

From a Voxeo point-of-view, what’s interesting is that this seems to have the potential of providing to users of our premise application platform, Prophecy, a similar kind of inbound Skype connectivity to what we’ve had for about four years now in our hosted application platform (and about which I wrote about last year). According to the info from Skype, Skype users would be able to call into applications by calling a Skype name which would then route the call over SIP to Prophecy. It’s a bit different from our hosted Skype connectivity in that it is a Skype name directing you to the entire platform, whereas in our hosted environment you have a Skype address for each application. Prophecy users would also, it seems, be able to use Skype For SIP to have outbound PSTN connectivity (a.k.a. “SIP trunking”) subject to Skype’s rates.

We’ll have to see how that all shakes out once we can try the software out, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Kudos to Skype for lowering their walls a bit and providing this kind of SIP support.

UPDATE: I also have a video podcast, Emerging Tech Talk #28, up on the subject.

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Technorati Tags: sip, skype

Given that I’m not actually in San Francisco for the 74th meeting of the IETF this week, I was extremely pleased to find this new prototype of the agenda page which makes it incredibly easy to follow the meeting remotely:

http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/74/

From one simple page you can:

• See the calendar of what working groups are meeting when.

• Download all the Internet-Drafts that will be covered in a session.
• Start listening to the audio.
• See a list of the presentations that will be given during the session (and then download those).
• Join the Jabber chat room for the session.
• Read the Jabber logs to know what was written about the session.
• See the agenda for the session.

Here’s how those items appear graphically:

I’m not sure who at IETF created this new prototype agenda page, but I have to say that as a remote attendee it is tremendously helpful to have all this information brought together on one simple page.

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Technorati Tags: IETF, standards, sip

The draft agenda for the 74th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has now been posted, giving a sense of what meetings will be held when. As I mentioned previously, IETF 74 will get underway on Monday, March 23rd and run for the week. There is a lot going on right now within the IETF, particularly within the RAI area that deals with SIP, so it should be a good meeting to attend.

For quite some time I have been planning to attend IETF 74 in person. However, in a change of plans on my end, I am currently thinking I will attend remotely. This is primarily due to the fact that my wife will be entering the final month of pregnancy with our second child and, well, I’m really looking to limit travel during that time.

The good news is that you can participate remotely in IETF meetings (here’s how it worked for IETF 71, and IETF 74 will be similar) to a good degree. You miss out, of course, on the hallway conversations and the impromptu meetings that do happen all the time. Likewise, you have to rely on others to relay your comments and can’t engage in some of the microphone-to-microphone debates that often occur. But it is possible…

Stay tuned for more info as IETF 74 gets closer…

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