Subject: RE: [newtrk] guestion 5 for newtrk, morphing back into question four

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 16:05:57 -0700

> I know that Megaco had concerns about MGCP even being published as an
> Informational RFC. IIRC (and Scott would remember this far more
> clearly), the concern was that as long as MGCP had an RFC number,
> especially if it had an RFC number before Megaco/H.248, that RFC
> number would end up in RFP checklists from people who had no idea that
> MGCP wasn't an IETF standard, and that another protocol was.

On the other hand, the publication of MGCP was clearly an example of
"checks and balances". If you recall the situation at the time, we had a
working group caught in politics. A fraction of the industry wanted to
move ahead with MGCP; another fraction did not want to concede a
time-to-market advantage to their competitors. Having a venue for
publication outside of "WG consensus" limits the possibility of using
the IETF process for playing "standards politics".

In that particular example, the "RFC checklist" argument does not really
apply. The customers for "soft switches" were reasonably large
telecommunication companies, either incumbent or their competitors. It
is hard to argue that they did not know what they were doing.

-- Christian Huitema

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