Speaking of Standards

Want to learn about the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)? Would you like to understand how the SIP protocol works and why it is the dominant open standard for communication today? Want to understand the challenges SIP faces and what’s being done to overcome them?

If so… and if you will be attending VoiceCon in Orlando, FL, March 22-25, you’ll be able to join my (Dan York) 3-hour tutorial on “SIP Fundamentals and Prospects” on Tuesday, March 23rd, from 2-5pm. The abstract VoiceCon has posted is this:

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has become the dominant protocol for IP communications. This workshop explains SIP — how it works, the major issues impacting deployments and how SIP will evolve in the future.

The session focuses on the technical aspects of SIP and how it is used. It analyzes in detail the major components of SIP architecture, SIP addressing and registration, session establishment, SIP message routing and connecting SIP across the PSTN. You will learn about SIP extensions and how SIMPLE works for IM/presence. The workshop also examines some of the challenges SIP faces, including NAT traversal (and the tools developed to cope with it: STUN, TURN and ICE) and security. The tutorial concludes with an assessment of how SIP may evolve and its role in peer-to-peer environments. You will receive an inventory of SIP resources—books, papers and organizations.

I’m very much looking forward to the session… although I still do have some work to finish up on the materials. For the past while my friend David Bryan has given these tutorials at VoiceCon events, but given that he also chairs IETF working groups he would need to clone himself since this VoiceCon is the same week as IETF 77 in Anaheim, California. It’s a wee bit hard to flip between coasts… and as anyone who has ever been to an IETF event knows, the meetings are intense and he is needed out there.

If you can’t attend VoiceCon this year, I’ll probably do some SIP tutorial webinars in the future and perhaps you’ll see something popping up over at Voxeo University… stay tuned. And if you are at VoiceCon, please do stop by and say hello… or send me an email in advance letting me know.

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Registration for the 77th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is now open. The IETF 77 event will take place March 21-26 in Anaheim, California (home of Disneyland).

Sadly, it looks like I personally will be missing this IETF meeting as I’ll be across the continent in the other home of Disney, Orlando, for VoiceCon Orlando 2010. I somehow don’t think the cross-country travel will work that week. The good news, though, is that the timezone will be such that I will be able to participate remotely. Remote participation wasn’t really an option for me with the recent IETF 76 in Japan.

One interesting point in the email announcement was that the IETF is offering essentially a “day pass” again for people who either want to just see what IETF is all about or who only care about sessions happening on a particular day. Per the email, for $200 you get:

1. Attend all sessions during any one day of the Meeting, and partake of the food and beverage during the breaks
2. You select which day to attend when you show up onsite to check-in
3. Payments may be made onsite without a late fee
4. Pass can be upgraded to a full Meeting Registration, however, late fee may apply if initial one-day payment not made before Early Bird deadline
5. Attend Sunday Tutorials at no additional charge
6. Attend Sunday Welcome Reception at no additional charge
7. Attend Wednesday and Thursday Plenaries at no additional charge

Seems like a nice option if all you just want to go to a day of sessions.

In any event, more information and the registration form can be found in links from the IETF 77 meeting page.

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The IETF today made a fairly major announcement:

The IAOC is pleased to announce the ancient and historic city of Beijing as the site for IETF 79 from 7 – 12 November 2010. This will be the IETF’s first meeting in China. The meeting will be held at the Shangri-La Beijing Hotel.

As noted, this will be the first time the IETF has met in China – and this announcement has not been without its share of controversy. Earlier during the negotiations with the hotel, the IAOC (the administrative arm of the IETF) asked the IETF committee for feedback on the venue and the terms under discussion. This set off a firestorm of discussion, as there was a clause in the hotel contract that allowed the hotel to terminate the proceedings if illegal content was discussed. The debate on the main IETF mailing list was extremely… um.. “vigorous” with all sorts of commentary around what constituted appropriate content, around “freedom of speech”, around censorship… and all the related topics. If you know anything about the IETF (or have been to an IETF meeting), you can appreciate the passion that this particular topic elicited.

In the end, the IAC reported that this specific clause was removed from the hotel contract:

During the course of contract negotiations with the hotel the community was asked via email lists and by survey about a specific provision in the contract. Your feedback guided us in our efforts. We are happy to report that the provision has been removed from the contract.

…

In response to concerns that the discussion of some IETF topics may violate the law, the IAOC has been assured by the Host that a normal IETF meeting can be legally held in China and that no pre-screening of material or monitoring of session content is required or will be done.

With that, the IAOC unanimously approved Beijing as the host of IETF 79.

Given that we have a Voxeo office in Beijing (which started with our Micromethod/SIPmethod team but has since expanded to include more folks working on all Voxeo products), we’re delighted that an IETF event will be happening there and look forward to having some of our folks attend.

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For those watching IETF standards, the draft agenda is now out for the upcoming 76th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force from November 8th through 13th in Hiroshima, Japan. As usual, it will be a jam-packed week of activity. The IETF 76 host committee has a great web site up filled with info about the event (including the fact that if you need a visa, you had better start now!).

Sadly, due to some other events on my schedule, I don’t expect to be out there at IETF76. And, given the 13-hour difference from US Eastern time, I somehow don’t see me participating remotely. Ah, well, I’ll just have to catch up face-to-face with IETF 77 in March in Anaheim, California…

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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

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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

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I don’t know how many of you reading this “Speaking of Standards” blog are also reading our blog portal, subscribing to the main Voxeo blog feed or following us on Twitter, but if you aren’t, I thought I would mention here that I recently launched a new video blog, “Emerging Tech Talk” and that last week three of my shows were specifically about the 73rd meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) held last week in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The shows were:

• Emerging Tech Talk #004, introducing the IETF

• Emerging Tech Talk #005, about the RAI area, SIP, P2PSIP Security and more
• Emerging Tech Talk #006, with a wrap-up of the week and mention of NAT for IPv6 and a bit about ENUM.

I also recorded some video interviews there at IETF 73 with Eric Burger of the SIP Forum, David Bryan of P2PSIP fame and Peter St. Andre of the XMPP Foundation. I’m aiming to put some of those up soon.

The Emerging Tech Talk video blog will not necessarily focus on standards… it will really be about whatever bright shiny objects I happen to be chasing at the time… but sometimes standards will factor in to it. You are definitely welcome to subscribe to the show feed if you would like to stay up on what I am doing – and comments are definitely welcome. (And yes, I will be making it available as a “podcast” that can be subscribed and downloaded to your computer, iPod or iPhone.) If you are a YouTube user, you can also subscribe to our “voxeovideos” channel directly inside of YouTube.com

Technorati Tags: voxeo, danyork, emergingtechtalk, ett, sip, ietf, ietf73

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The next SIPit SIP interoperability testing event, SIPit 23 will be October 13-17 over in Lannion, France. More information about the event – and the registration info – can be found on the ETSI page for SIPit23 (ETSI is the host for this SIPit.) We’re a big fan of interoperability test events like this because in the end they only help all of our products grow stronger and help SIP advance as a communication protocol. We’re currently planning to have someone from Voxeo over there… perhaps maybe even more than one.

If you have a SIP-based product, do consider attending – and maybe we’ll be able to test some interop together when we’re over there.

Technorati Tags: sip, sipit, sipforum, voice, voip, voxeo

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As I’ve written about before, we’re fans of the SIPit interoperability events that are sponsored by the SIP Forum as they provide a great way to test how well different vendors SIP implementations interoperate. We recently attended SIPit 22 at the University of New Hampshire and the feedback was extremely helpful in our continual effort to improve our products.

Anyway, SIPit 23 was recently announced for October 13-17 in Lannion, France. The event is hosted by the ETSI Interopolis Service and France Telecom-Orange Labs. ETSI has a website for the SIPit 23 event that is full of information about the event.

I don’t honestly know yet whether we’ll be attending, but I do encourage vendors to seriously take a look at attending. It’s a great place to learn how well your SIP implementation plays nice with others.

Technorati Tags: sip, sipit, sip forum, interop, interoperability, etsi

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As I wrote about previously, the IETF is hosting a “P2P Infrastructure Workshop” next week on May 28th on the MIT campus near Boston. There have been some updates in the past week:

• The workshop agenda has been published.

• The list of submitted papers is now available.

• Copies of the submitted papers are available for download as individual files or as a ZIP file containing all papers. (Note that this link does not work with all browsers. On my Mac it worked in Safari but not in Firefox 3.)

Reading through the agenda, it sounds like it will be a great session. P2P is really the next great area of network development, in my opinion, and making sure that the environment is such that we can do it well is key to seeing innovation and growth in that space. Anything like this workshop that can help set the stage for P2P developments is definitely to be encouraged.

P.S. I had hoped to attend myself, but given that I’ve got a moving truck showing up about 36 hours after this workshop ends (I’m moving from VT to NH) I somehow don’t see me getting down there.

Technorati Tags: ietf, p2p, networking, internet, workshops

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