Speaking of Standards

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

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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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UPDATE: There’s also an interview with Jason up on YouTube about his new role.

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

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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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