Archive for March, 2008

Want to know what IETF 71 looked like? Some photos…

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

PlenaryIf you want to get a sense of what an IETF meeting is all about, I’ve now uploaded a set of photos from the recent IETF 71 meeting in Philadelphia.

If you get the sense that we spent a lot of time sitting in chairs… you would be correct! It’s all about chairs, hallway conversations and, of course, (for those of us with no aversion to speaking publicly) the microphone! (Unless, that is, someone relocates the mic. :-)

IETF meetings also naturally involve a whole lot of email, even while we are there at the meeting. Given that we had a very solid wireless network (even if access points were sometimes on chairs) and we also had a 100 Gbps (yes, you read that correctly – 100 Gigabits per second!) connection to the Internet via Comcast you’ll notice that basically every picture has a very high density of laptops. If there were 1300 people at the meeting, probably 1295 of the attendees had a laptop there with them.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Want to learn how Voxeo can help unlock your communications and deliver a better customer experience? Please contact us!

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

Tags:
Posted in Conferences, IETF | No Comments »

P2P (peer-to-peer) SIP – List of implementations now available

Monday, March 24th, 2008

p2psip.jpgWant to try out peer-to-peer SIP? (P2PSIP?) One of the areas of work within the IETF right now that intrigues me the most is the whole effort around “peer-to-peer” SIP, a.k.a. “P2PSIP”. The idea is that you could have “SIP without servers”, i.e. a range of SIP endpoints (hard phones, soft phones, etc.) that would learn of each other and communicate with each other using SIP over a P2P network (also referred to as a “P2P overlay” or sometimes just casually as a “P2P cloud”).

In another post at some point, I’ll write more about why P2PSIP is intriguing to me (and for Voxeo), but for the moment I thought I’d post that David Bryan, chair of the IETF’s P2PSIP Working Group, has very nicely put up a page listing existing implementations of P2PSIP technology. There are several open source implementations, as well as a commercial implementation from David’s own company, SIPeerior Technologies (he’s the CEO). All of these are implementations of exists drafts and so they will undoubtedly change as the drafts evolve and morph into RFCs over the next months and years ahead. Still, if you’d like to experiment and get a sense of what people are working on, the implementations are now out there!

P.S. David has also posted the P2PSIP presentations from IETF 71 earlier this month.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Want to learn how Voxeo can help unlock your communications and deliver a better customer experience? Please contact us!

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

Tags: , ,
Posted in IETF, P2P, SIP | No Comments »

And so IETF 71 draws to a close…

Friday, March 14th, 2008

ietflogo-2.jpgIt’s been a long and exhausting week… There are so many things I have wanted to write about… the RUCUS BOF… the MEDIACTRL session… the IPv6 experiment in the first plenary… the P2P video presentation in the technical plenary… the SIPPING and SIP sessions… the SPEERMINT and PEPPERMINT sessions… meeting the co-author of a draft I wrote who I had never met… the VERY lively P2PSIP session this morning… my challenges streaming video with hot laptops… cheese steaks and random strangers… the 100 Gbps network that Comcast brought in (yes, you read that correctly!)… so many sessions… so many great conversations… so many great people… so much great work going on… so many great stories to tell…

Alas, those stories will have to wait for late Sunday or Monday (or next week)… right now it’s time for me to head offline for some family time before I head out Sunday afternoon to Orlando for VoiceCon!

Technorati Tags: ,

Want to learn how Voxeo can help unlock your communications and deliver a better customer experience? Please contact us!

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

Tags:
Posted in Conferences, IETF, SIP, Standards | No Comments »

Ever had a lousy WiFi network at a conference? You don’t at IETF…

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

How many conferences have you attended where the WiFi network – if there even is one – has been really poor? Or charged you an arm and a leg to use it?

That doesn’t happen at IETF meetings… bandwidth is usually decent and accessible in in all meeting rooms and common areas – at no charge to meeting attendees. Why? Because the IETF brings in its own network!

Indeed, there’s even a document on “Meeting Network Requirements” which spells out how to arrange such a network. Here’s the abstract:

The IETF Meeting Network has become integral to the success of any IETF meeting. Building such a network, which provides service to thousands of heavy users, spread throughout the event venue, with very little time for setup and testing is a dramatic challenge. This document provides a set of requirements, derived from hard won experience, as an aid to anyone involved in designing and deploying future networks.

If only other conferences could have a network like this!

P.S. Here’s a piece in the Philadelphia Business Journal that goes into this: “1,500-strong laptop invasion to hit Marriott for Net task force” (hat tip to Comcast’s IETF71 blog).

Technorati Tags: , ,

Want to learn how Voxeo can help unlock your communications and deliver a better customer experience? Please contact us!

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

Tags: ,
Posted in Conferences, IETF | 2 Comments »

How to participate in IETF-71 remotely through real-time audio and IM groupchat

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

ietflogo-2.jpgIf you would like to listen to what is going on at the IETF-71 sessions in Philadelphia the sessions will be streamed in real-time courtesy of the Network Startup Resource Center at the University of Oregon. (Tip to Comcast’s IETF71 site for the link.)

You can also join in the IETF group chatrooms to see commentary during the sessions and also to ask your own questions. Each working group typically has someone acting as Jabber “scribe” during the session who will type updates into the chat room and also pose questions from chatroom members.

So here’s how you can participate remotely:

1. LOOK AT THE OVERALL AGENDA – Browse the meeting agenda and find the session(s) you want to attend.

2. FIND THE WORKING GROUP ABBREVIATION AND/OR ROOM – This is the important part. You need the “Working Group” or BOF abbreviation to go on to the next steps. Let’s say that on the agenda you want to following the “Multiparty Multimedia Session Control WG” on Monday morning at 9:00am. The working group abbreviation is “mmusic” and it is going to be in room “Franklin 3/4″.

3. FIND THE AUDIO STREAM FOR THE SESSION – Go to the audio streaming page and look at the row for the room and the column for the day. You should see the Working Group abbreviation there. Click on the audio link for that room. For instance, MMUSIC tomorrow morning at 9am is on audio channel “ietf71-ch2“.

4. JOIN THE IM GROUP CHATROOM – To join the group chatrooms you’ll need a Jabber-based IM client which could be something as simple as GoogleTalk. If you are on a Mac, Adium works great with your GMail/GoogleTalk account. Connect to the Jabber server “jabber.ietf.org” and join the “room” of the working group abbreviation. For instance, MMUSIC would be “mmusic” (and the full Jabber name of the room will be “mmusic@jabber.ietf.org”).

5. LOOK AT THE SESSION AGENDA / MEETING MATERIALS – Look at the session agenda / materials list to see what is specifically being talked about and what slides might be available for you to view. NOTE: Session materials are often not posted until the session is ready to start (or sometimes afterward).

If you’ve followed these steps, you should now be listening to the audio for the session and also connected into Jabber where you can potentially find out who is at the microphone and – if you want – ask your own questions. If you have a questions, the “Jabber scribe” for the session can get to the microphone and ask the question for you.

A couple of notes:

  • Philadelphia is in the US Eastern timezone. Note that we just shifted to Daylight Savings Time so there’s an hour timezone difference from yesterday.

  • Jabber chat rooms will probably be empty until there is an actual session going on.
  • There are Jabber chat rooms for the working groups but not necessarily for BOFs. It’s not always clear what Jabber chat room a BOF will use.
  • When you join a Jabber chat room, if no one identifies themself as the scribe, feel free to ask. (Hint: It’s probably the person typing a lot.)
  • Note that Jabber chat sessions are archived, so please realize that everything you say in them will be public.

All in all it’s a great way for remote participants to join in to what is going on down at IETF…. so check it out!

Technorati Tags: ,

Want to learn how Voxeo can help unlock your communications and deliver a better customer experience? Please contact us!

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Conferences, IETF, Standards | 2 Comments »

My schedule next week in the long days of IETF-71…

Friday, March 7th, 2008

ietflogo-2.jpgOn Sunday night I head down to Philadelphia for the IETF-71 meeting for the whole week. It will be a crazy week full of discussions and conversations about all the various standards under development. The RUCUS BOF I’ve mentioned before will be on Monday as is the SIPPING Working Group. MEDIACTRL Working Group (of key interest to us here at Voxeo) is on Wednesday as is SPEERMINT and PEPPERMINT (Hey, it’s IETF, you have to have cute names!). Thursday brings SIP, BEHAVE, AVT and ENUM and Friday morning winds it all up with the P2PSIP working group.

Being who I am, I’ll pretty much sit in all of the “Realtime Applications and Infrastructure” (RAI) working groups as sometimes activity in one group turns out to have great relevance to work in other groups (or to work here at Voxeo). I’ll be online the Jabber chat rooms probably much of the whole time as well.

If you’ve never seen the full agenda for an IETF meeting, it’s pretty incredible (at least to me!). In any given timeslot there are typically eight simultaneous meetings of various working groups, BOFs, research groups, etc. This makes sense if you remember that the IETF is developing standards for pretty much all aspects of the Internet. While I usually never leave the world of RAI, there are groups dealing with security, DNS, email, IPv6, network routing, time (seriously!), host configuration and pretty much every other subject you can imagine relating to the Internet. Take a look!

And yes, the days do begin with a breakfast at 8am and meetings that go until 7pm (often with additional ad hoc meetings afterwards). The good news is that the breaks between sessions usually have food and drink to keep you recharged.

For those attending who wish to stalkfind me, here below is the agenda I think I’ll be following (subject to the fact that it can, of course, change). Like I said earlier, it’s pretty much all of the RAI area.

MONDAY, March 10, 2008
0800-0900 Continental Breakfast – Franklin Hall Foyer

0900-1130 Morning Session I

RAI mmusic Multiparty Multimedia Session Control WG

1300-1500 Afternoon Session I

RAI rucus Ruducing Unwanted Communications using SIP BOF

1520-1720 Afternoon Session II

RAI ecrit Emergency Context Resolution with Internet Technologies WG

1740-1950 Afternoon Session III

RAI sipping Session Initiation Proposal Investigation WG

TUESDAY, March 11, 2008
0800-0900 Continental Breakfast – Franklin Hall Foyer

0900-1130 Morning Session I
One of these:

IRTF rrg Routing Research Group
OPS v6ops IPv6 Operations WG
RAI geopriv Geographic Location/Privacy WG

1300-1500 Afternoon Session I

RAI bliss Basic Level of Interoperability for SIP Services WG

1520-1720 Afternoon Session II

RAI avt Audio/Video Transport WG

1740-1840 Afternoon Session III
One of these:

IRTF asrg Anti-Spam Research Group
RAI simple SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions WG

1850-1950 Afternoon Session IV

RAI xcon Centralized Conferencing WG

WEDNESDAY, March 12, 2008
0800-0900 Continental Breakfast – Franklin Hall Foyer

0900-1130 Morning Session I

RAI mediactrl Media Server Control WG

1300-1500 Afternoon Session I

RAI speermint Session PEERing for Multimedia INTerconnect WG

1510-1610 Afternoon Session II

RAI peppermint Provisioning Extensions in Peering Registries for Multimedia INTerconnection BOF

1610-1700 PGP Session
(Yes, I’m one of those people who does actually go to PGP key signings.)

pgp PGP Key Signing

1700-1930 IETF Operations and Administration Plenary – Salon G/H

THURSDAY, March 13, 2008
0800-1700 IETF Registration – Franklin Hall Foyer

0800-0900 Continental Breakfast – Franklin Hall Foyer

0900-1130 Morning Session I

RAI sip Session Initiation Protocol WG

1300-1500 Afternoon Session I
One of these:

IRTF hiprg Host Identity Protocol
SEC saag Security Area Open Meeting
TSV behave Behavior Engineering for Hindrance Avoidance WG

1510-1610 Afternoon Session II
One of these:

RAI avt Audio/Video Transport WG
RAI enum Telephone Number Mapping WG

1700-1930 Technical Plenary – Salon G/H

FRIDAY, March 14, 2008

0800-0900 Continental Breakfast – Franklin Hall Foyer

0900-1130 Morning Session I

RAI p2psip Peer-to-Peer Session Initiation Protocol WG

Want to learn how Voxeo can help unlock your communications and deliver a better customer experience? Please contact us!

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in IETF, SIP, Standards | 1 Comment »

RUCUS web page changed to a new URL

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

ietflogo-2.jpgAs I mentioned previously, the “RUCUS” BOF about voice spam at IETF 71 in Philadelphia is one of great interest to us. Unfortunately BOF co-chair Hannes Tschofenig ran into a problem with his domain and had to move the page to a new URL: http://www.shingou.info/bof-rucus.html

If you saved the URL or sent it on to someone, you’ll need to update to using the new URL. If you didn’t visit the RUCUS page before, please do check it out – and feel free to join the RUCUS mailing list. Of course, if you can, please do join us in person in Philadelphia!

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Want to learn how Voxeo can help unlock your communications and deliver a better customer experience? Please contact us!

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

Tags: , ,
Posted in IETF, SIP, Security, Standards | No Comments »