Speaking of Standards

Network World is out today with a report on a survey that they are headlining “Most IT pros say their websites, networks will support IPv6 by 2013“. The survey article and accompanying slide set do indeed have some fantastic numbers including that 65% of the respondents say they’ll have IPv6 running on their internal networks within two years.

As much as I am a huge advocate of IPv6, this survey data just seemed too good to be true… and indeed I have to wonder about the methodology. This sentence in the article is key to me (my emphasis added):

These IT professionals proclaimed strong support for IPv6 deployment in the online survey, which attracted 210 respondents.

How did Network World promote this survey? Was it through a general banner on their websites? Through email blasts or newsletters?

Or was it through links associated with IPv6-related articles? (In which case IPv6 advocates like me might read those articles and then follow the link to the survey.)

Don’t get me wrong… I’d love it if the data were really accurate… but that timeframe seems rather aggressive to me. It feels more like a number that might come out of a population of IPv6 enthusiasts/advocates.

Regardless, it’s good to see IPv6-related surveys out like this… perhaps it will encourage some other sites to run their own surveys. And perhaps this survey might also get some enterprises thinking about IPv6 so as not to be left behind!

Sadly, this XKCD comic can seem all too true sometimes…

Today SIPit coordinator Robert Sparks announced to several mailing lists that registration is open for SIPit 29, to be held October 24-28, 2011, in Monte Carlo, Monaco. The event has its own website at:

http://www.etsi.org/plugtests/SIPIT29/

and the “About” page gives a bit more detail.

I’ve written about SIPit events before – and we as a company have found them immensely valuable. They are a great place to bring your latest SIP software and hardware and test it against a wide range of other SIP implementations. Basically it’s an inexpensive way to get a week’s use of a better interoperability test lab than you will probably ever be able to build on your own.

The SIPit events also are great for our industry in that they help vendors make their equipment work better together… and the more we have of that the sooner we’ll be able to move beyond the PSTN and get the full value of rich communication possible in a pure IP communications environment.

I do hope many of you will consider going to SIPit 29!

Last week on July 12th, the W3C’s Web Real-Time Communications Working Group (“WebRTC” – one half of the overall “RTCWEB Initiative”) held a conference call to help advance the work of the group.

Group leader Harald Alvestrand posted a summary of the call to the public webrtc mailing list. A set of minutes was later sent to the list and an IRC log is also available. The main focus right now is on getting full clarity of the requirements and beginning to define the API.

There will also be a face-to-face meeting on Saturday, July 23rd, in Quebec City, Canada. Registration is open and a good number of folks are already planning to attend. The date was chosen because IETF 81 starts July 24th there in Queubec City and many of the W3C WebRTC participants will also be joining in the RTCWEB working group meeting of the IETF. (Confused, yet?)

More discussion of all of this can be found on the public-webrtc mailing list. Great discussion currently going on… the time to join is really now if you want to help shape how this communication occurs between browsers.

Just in time for the submission deadline for IETF 81, Voxeo’s Dan Burnett was able to get in what will hopefully be the last draft of the Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP), version 2, a.k.a. “MRCPv2″. The new document (revision 25!) is available at:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-speechsc-mrcpv2

If you aren’t familiar with MRCP, I explained a bit about the problem it is trying to solve back in March when the “Last Call” was issued for comments.

Somewhat predictably, there were comments after the “last call” and so with this revision 25 Dan B has incorporated many of those comments. You can see the diff of what has changed at:

http://tools.ietf.org/rfcdiff?difftype=–hwdiff&url2=draft-ietf-speechsc-mrcpv2-25.txt

Coming in at a whopping 226 pages, this is a significant document. Here’s hoping for Dan B’s sake that this is in fact the final draft!

The IETF this week released an important new draft titled “Design Considerations for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Overload Control” that is available at:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-soc-overload-design

The importance here is that it is a fact of life that SIP-based communication servers can get “overloaded” with messages and not be able to respond to all incoming SIP messages. A SIP server could be overloaded by situations such as:

• too many users wanting to make simultaneous calls (think of the extreme case of a crisis situation)
• a failure of upstream connectivity that limits the capacity of the SIP server
• some other program on the server itself that consumes so much CPU and other resources that the SIP application can’t operate efficiently
• some SIP endpoint(s) that are spewing bogus messages at the server.
• an attacker executing a Denial-of-Service attack

Regardless of the mechanism, SIP servers need to be able to gracefully handle an overload.

The IETF has in fact spun up a Working Group – SIP Overload Control (SOC) – focused on this exact problem and chartered to come up with mechanisms to cope with SIP overload

This Internet-Draft on overload design considerations is one of the documents of this group and is well worth a read, as it explores the various mechanisms that can be used to combat overload.

Incidentally, if you’d like to join in the SOC discussions, or even just monitor what is being discussed, the working group operates a public mailing list at:

https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/sip-overload

Overload is definitely a potential issue within SIP networks and it’s good to see this group working on the issue.

In just 13 days, the 81st meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) will kick off up in the beautiful world of Quebec City in Canada. It will be the usual jam-packed week of meetings on the very wide range of topics covered by the IETF.

Of particular interest to those of us in the real-time communications area will be the ongoing discussions of the RTCWEB initiative that is looking at how to bring real-time communications directly into web browsers.

There is still time to register to attend IETF 81 if you have not already done so.

Voxeo’s head of standards, Dan Burnett, will be attending on our behalf. Please contact him if you would like to meet up with him at the event. You can expect to find him in most of the various SIP and RAI events. (Sadly, my schedule does not permit me (Dan York) to attend this event… I’m looking forward to getting back to one of these IETF meetings soon!)

How will IPv6 impact telecommunications? Out at eComm 2011 two weeks ago I gave a talk titled “How IPv6 Will Kill Telecom – And What We Need To Do About It” and while the video won’t be online for some time, my slides are available. Granted, the particular style of presenting I use means that the slides themselves may not be as valuable without the narration… but you may find the links and issues raised to be useful:

P.S. I have had a couple of people ask if I would be open to presenting a variation of this presentation for their company or conference… and my answer is that yes, I’m usually very open to giving presentations if my schedule allows. Webinars/webcasts are easy to line up… and delivering the presentation in person may certainly be an option. Please just contact me and we can figure out what makes sense.

We are very pleased to see today that the W3C has published CCXML (Call Control XML) as a formal “Recommendation“. Within the W3C standards process, this is the the highest level that a standard can attain and is the result of a great amount of work by a great number of people over many years. To celebrate, we have :

• issued a news release celebrating the milestone and discussing Voxeo’s involvement and our use of CCXML within our products; and
• created a CCXML Resource page where you can find links to CCXML-related tutorials, white papers, source code and more.

As the news release mentions, Voxeo’s CTO RJ Auburn has been involved with CCXML since the early days and is the chair of the CCXML working group within the W3C. Voxeo’s Dan Burnett is now the chair of the overall Voice Browser Working Group under which CCXML and VoiceXML fall. Voxeo Prophecy was the first commercial implementation of CCXML, was the first (and remains the only) engine to support 100% of the CCXML specification and pass the entire W3C test suite for CCXML, and has been licensed out by other companies looking to include CCXML inside their products and services.

We are delighted to see this formal step in the W3C standards process and look forward to seeing even more applications being built out there that use the power of CCXML!

If you’re looking for a humorous way to start off your Tuesday morning, here’s a video created using XtraNormal that someone shared in the IPv6 Enthusiasts group on LinkedIn:

Of course… you may only find this humorous if you are a network geek… (as I am).