on 09/05/2000 7:37 AM, Masataka Ohta at mohta@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp wrote:
Sean;
I think the IETF is valuable, but what do you tell investors when they ask what's in it for them?
You have no problem, because it is as good as ISO.
Moverover, within NANOG context, it is better than ISO, because it is US-centric that 2 of 3 meetings in a year is held in US (remaining one often in CA).
If UUNET needs some operational feature in a protocol, they call up their Cisco engineer and say jump. Presto, in the next release train, feature X shows up. Who needs rough consensus?
Then, no one.
In theory, internet/routing areas are the only area where so valued rough consensus and interoperability could be meaningful.
Physical/datalink layer protocols are purely local. Transport/application layer protocols are chosen by the market, because of the end to end principle,
My comment for all these points: 1. The cost of deployment, management and increasing complexity suggest that common standards will reduce cost of operations for ISPs - why the investors should be interested. They will say that the cost of the equipment is only a fraction of the total cost of ownership with human labor being an increasing component. 2. It is true the ISPs and large customers have always had leverage with various vendors - a good thing. A side effect is that this tends to divide the market and hamper interoperability and management. Even when the market is dominated by a few or just two vendors, there is division. If one is dominant the others are at a disadvantage leading to one force that is hard to steer even by large customers. If, on the other hand, standards are well crafted with informed input by all parties; vendors, users and other technologists, the result will be better and operational costs will be reduced. BTW, physical and datalink protocols are no longer purely local. Long haul standards for various optical techniques are important unless one wants to build a network out of only one vendors equipment. /jon