Subject: RE: [Ieprep] Re: more process discussion

From: "Folts, Harold" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 13:16:17 -0500

> -----Original Message-----
> From: King, Kimberly S. [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 12:17 PM
> To: 'Folts, Harold'; 'RJ Atkinson'
> Cc: 'ieprep'
> Subject: RE: [Ieprep] Re: more process discussion
> 
> 
> You made a point of twice stating "FUTURE networks".  It 
> might be worth
> elaborating what you mean by this.
> 

I am not interested in addressing today's PSTN. It provides a very good
service in the US and other countries for emergency and disaster relief
operations. 

The Internet technology offers an excellent protential to support emergency
communications in times of disaster. With the Internet being widely
available and also with the Internet technology being integrated into public
telecommunication networks in the future, there is a good opportunity to
leverage these capabilies for use in emergency and disaster relief
operations for the benefit of the public at large.

Therefore, I an seeking to bring technical provisions into Internet
technology that will provide highly reliable and available communication
capabilities in times of serious disaster and limited bandwidth.

The only issue that I see with the PSTN is the need for an interface with
some IP-based networks to pass telephony traffic. The more important issue
is to have the capability using IP technology to convey any type of
communication (not just voice) that would be beneficial to disaster relief.

Hal
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---

From: Bill Woodcock <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 10:17:56 -0800 (PST)

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Folts, Harold wrote:
    > The Internet technology offers an excellent protential to support
    > emergency communications in times of disaster.

Uh, this isn't "potential," this is actual fact.  The question at hand is
whether there's a problem that needs to be fixed.  Is there a problem
which needs to be fixed?  If so, can you articulate it, quantify it, and
describe the process you went through to discover and identify it?

                                -Bill

---

From: "Barry Raveendran Greene" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 10:58:51 -0800

> capabilities in times of serious disaster and limited bandwidth.

And this is the point were people are not hearing each other. ISPs who have
any clue do _not_ build a network that is vulnerable to "serious disaster
and limited bandwidth." This is especially true for the top ten players
(using Skitter as the metric for the top ten). ISPs have to design for
_DAILY_ disasters! Floods, storms, equipment failure, back hoe failure,
maintenance injected human error (the biggest cause of 'network disasters'),
earthquakes, anchor pulls (cutting trans-oceanic cables), wars (spilling
over into cyber attacks), and a wide range of there "real world" factors
impact ISP's networks every day. It is a _business imperative_ that you
design you network to cope with these global disasters.

Watching the conversation for the past week, I see the ISP operations side
saying that "ISPs design for disaster today - requiring zero packet loose on
the links and the ability to flap traffic over to backup paths without
circuit saturation - what's the problem?"

On the other side I see people who think the ISPs do not have any clue,
require QOS, require someone to tell them how to run their network, and do
not know how to build their networks to cope with disasters. Yes, there are
many ISPs out there who are clueless. There are lots of others ISPs who have
an unbelievable insight of how the Internet really operates - designing
networks that cope with all sorts of "disasters" - disaster that most of the
people on this group never ever see. Why? Cause the reliability of these ISP
network hide these outage from the masses.

History proves that the many ISPs know how to plan and design for these
everyday disasters. New "technical provisions" are being provided (speaking
as a vendor), but are driven by the people designing, running, building,
selling these networks. What I see is people projecting their own
perceptions on these designers/builders/operators and these people pushing
back. Not

At the same time we have people throwing the customer tail circuits into the
zone of "ISP's control." From as ISP design point of view, the tail circuit
between them and their customer is a DMZ - a place of limited control - a
place where the outside world or the customer can saturate at any moment.
This has been a place where all sorts of "technical provision" are applied.
This is the place where customer SLA is applied to keep two parties in sync
with the real congestion problems (people who think it is the ISPs who is
required to meet SLA agreements, think again).

Honestly, from what I've seen over the past three weeks demonstrates that
this WG is dead. The way correspondence is flowing shows me that rough
consensus is not going to be reached. At best, some informational RFCs will
be published which could be used for RFPs. But those would be little
different from the work done already to support contractual SLAs.

ADs - please make sure your at the meeting.

---

From: Ken Carlberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 10:32:46 +0000

> different from the work done already to support contractual SLAs.

<non-technical-comments>...feel free to hit the delete key

there are 3 basic discussions going on.  the first involves actual 
drafts, and there is agreement that various amounts of work need to 
be done to some of these.  thats normal.  hopefully, we can reach
consensus on Henning's SIP requirements draft and wave bon voyage as
we send it packing to SIPPING :-).  as for some of the other drafts,
some clarifications (and in one or two cases, possibly major surgery)
needs to be done.  regardless, all these other drafts are to be 
Informational and are not to offer a specific solution (see previous 
N messages in the Archive on what the charter is).

the second set of discussions revolve around what I would consider are
solutions.  here the contention level increases dramatically and some
of the comments/arguements are looking a bit circular (ie, deja vu), but 
one can still extract nuggets of good/inciteful information.  i tend to
keep thinking "one size does not fit all" when reading a number of these
messages, but everyone can take from it what they will.

the third set of messages, are the ones that don't apply to the first
two above, and I shall leave it at that.  for those that are newbies, 
this happens on occasion.

in the end, the main output and concern of the ADs/Chairs/group are
the Informational drafts.  everything else is a bonus :-)

</non-technical-comments>

cheers,

-ken