Speaking of Standards

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.

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sip, sipit, sip forum, interop, interoperability, etsi

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.

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ietf, p2p, networking, internet, workshops

What happens when a 100 or so SIP developers and engineers get together with all their gear? Well, starting today at the University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Lab in Durham, NH, those developers will be participating in SIPit 22 and testing the interoperability of their solutions with those of everyone else. Sponsored by the SIP Forum and currently coordinated by Robert Sparks, the events provide a place for SIP implementors to test out how well their products work with others’. When you attend, you essentially arrange with others there to test your product with theirs and do so. The results are not published… it’s just a place for engineers/developers to go and work together on interop. Summaries of what occurred are released and you can get a sense of what goes one through the summary of SIPit 21 this past November in Beijing.

As you might expect, since I’m writing about this, one of our lead SIP developers is up there at SIPit 22 with our Prophecy product. As we’re working on some improvements in our SIP support that we’ll release in new versions of Prophecy over the next year or so, he’s looking forward to testing our new work and learning how well it works (or doesn’t work) with many other SIP implementations.

Given that SIP is composed of so many pieces and there are so many options in the way in which you can implement parts of SIP, events like SIPit that foster interoperability are really a key way to helping the industry grow. It’s great to see the SIP Forum continue to sponsor the SIPit events and we look forward to participating more in the future. Meanwhile, we’ll be very curious to see what results are brought home at the end of the week…

Technorati Tags:
sip, sip forum, sipit, standards, ietf, voxeo, prophecy

If 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:
ietf, ietf71, philadelphia, comcast, standards

It’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!

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ietf, ietf71

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:
ietf, conferences, wifi

If 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:
IETF, standards

If you are the considering attending the 71st IETF meeting March 10-14 in Philadelphia, you may want to also visit the IETF-71 micro-site put up online by Comcast, the host of IETF-71. They’ve done a good job providing information about the hotel, restaurants, the social event and more. (And yes, they of course have a link to where to find the best cheese steaks… )

Over on the Voice of VOIPSA blog today I posted about a new session has been approved for the IETF 71 meeting coming up in Philadelphia in March called “Reducing Unwanted Communications using SIP” a.k.a. “RUCUS”.Hannes Tschofenig, who submitted the proposal, has created a RUCUS web page and is looking for feedback. I’m planning to be at the RUCUS session at IETF 71 and would encourage others who want to talk about voice spam / SPIT to join in as well!

Technorati Tags:
rucus, spit, spam, voice spam, voip, voip security, security, ietf, standards

For those of you attending the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo this week in Miami Beach, Floriday, the SIP Forum will be holding a SIPconnect Compliance Workshop on Friday, January 25th, from 10am-1pm. The workshop is free and the agenda is available. If you are at the show, please do come on by and learn about this initiative from the SIP Forum to help ensure interoperability for SIP trunking between service providers and IP-PBX systems. I’ll be there and it would be great to meet anyone reading this blog.

Technorati Tags:
sip, sip forum, sipconnect, sip trunking, itexpo, internet telephony expo, miami