Subject: RE: IP over MIME (was Re: WAP Is A Trap -- Reject WAP)

From: "Taylor, Johnny" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 11:48:16 -0400

All,

I have seen a lot of different people bash WAP over the past two days.
However, I
am a firm believer that WAP will become what IP is to us today. When you
relate the 
technologies of today and the future technologies from a Telecommunication
stand point.
Then you will find IP is on the rise today and various Platforms are
integrating or
converging IP to their core networks. But when you equate the moves that are
taking
place for future solutions to the commercial or residential market. such as
The Teledesic 
Model or AOL or Manasamen; then you began to get a glimpse 
of the future of WAP. Therefore I think it becomes quite important for this
group to 
keep WAP as one of the main protocols of discussion / solutions. That's my
take on WAP!

Coming from the Brain!

JT 

-----Original Message-----
From: Donald E. Eastlake 3rd [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 7:31 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: IP over MIME (was Re: WAP Is A Trap -- Reject WAP)

See <ftp://ftp.ietf.org//internet-drafts/draft-eastlake-ip-mime-03.txt>.

Donald

From:  Magnus Danielson <[email-masked]>
To:  [email-masked]
Cc:  [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
In-Reply-To:  <[email-masked]>
References:  <[email-masked]>
	    	<[email-masked]>
Message-Id:  <[email-masked]>
Date:  Wed, 21 Jun 2000 10:40:40 +0200

>From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
>Subject: Re: WAP Is A Trap -- Reject WAP
>Date: Wed, 21 Jun 0 5:42:32 JST
>
>> Phil;
>> 
>> > >IP over NAT is, in no way, end-to-end.
>> > 
>> > >WAP and IP over NAT are equally bad.
>> > 
>> > I think you're overstating your case. Yes, IP over NAT is bad, but
>> > it's nowhere near as bad as WAP.
>> 
>> If you think so, don't say "end-to-end".
>> 
>> > If you want, it is still possible to "reconstruct" a true end-to-end
>> > IP service by tunneling it through a NAT with something vaguely
>> > resembling mobile IP.
>> 
>> You can have IP over HTTP, IP over XML or IP over WAP equally easily.
>
>With IP over MIME you could even establish an IP connection over a mail
>gateway, firewall bypassing... Hmm.... the same goes for http proxies.
>
>> The problem, however, is that the reconstruction point is an
>> intelligent gateway which violates the end to end principle.
>
>Havent we learned to love and hate these breaking of layering?
>
>You can put basically anything over anything else when it comes to just
moving
>bits around. While doing this we get the additional benefits of increased
>propagation delay, increased overhead, often complexer solutions and a new
>bag of problems in the interworking area. Lovely. We can feed a lot of
>research and engineer mouths this way.
>
>Now, while NAT and WAP both intend to solve some problems, they provide
ground
>for new problems which naturally require new solutions. We should really
ask
>weither some of these problems really should be solved within that scope or
>not. If IP over WAP is a bag of worms, maybe one should bypass WAP
alltogether.
>Where we know that neither ATM, IP or NAT solves all the problems neither
will
>WAP.
>
>It is not really what you could do as what you should do. Naturally there
is
>allways politically and technical preferences which prohibits some
solutions.
>Cheers,
>Magnus

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 14:13:26 -0400

> However, I am a firm believer that WAP will become what IP is to us today. 

WAP might evolve into something more useful, but I don't see how it will
replace IP in any sense.  WAP as it currently exists isn't a solution 
to any future problem - it is a solution to the problem of how to 
build a consumer information service over SMS and cell phones with limited
displays.  But cell networks are starting to deploy far better data
delivery services than SMS (more bandwidth, less latency) and I expect
that cell phones will get better display capabilities along with PDA
functionality (and likewise, PDAs will get wireless data capability).
Under these conditions, WAP as we know it today isn't very interesting.

My personal experience with present-day WAP is that it's slower and
more difficult to use than comperable voice-based services.

I expect that WAP will evolve, and continue to be used, because there will 
certainly be some services that fit its market niche.  But it will 
generally be run over IP, because IP will generally be available and
it is more efficient than SMS.  And it will be just one of many IP-based 
services that are accessible from a wireless platform.

Keith

---

From: "Brijesh Kumar" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 16:16:40 -0400

Keith Moore writes:

> replace IP in any sense.

One is an architecture for supporting application on diverse wireless
systems, and other is a network layer packet transport mechanism. Two
aren't even comparable.

WAP's goal is not to replace IP, but mediate between non-IP wireless
devices, and existing IP based wire line applications.

> WAP as it currently exists isn't a solution
> build a consumer information service over SMS and cell phones
> with limited displays.

No. It is a solution of how to support meaningful applications over a
wireless channel with *limited bandwidth*, and use the same
application over wide variety of radio protocols and systems without
change (or minimal change). Meaningful applications include some of
current wire line applications. The size of display has nothing to do
with it. The bottleneck is BANDWIDTH not the display size (you may
have a device that has a screen size of 1 meter by 1 meter - but that
doesn't obviate the need of devising mechanisms that better utilize
the radio spectrum.

> But cell networks are starting to deploy far better data

See above. The size of display isn't the issue. Contrary to what you
say, most people who work in cellular industry think that WAP is very
interesting piece of work given the limitations of the systems that
are *widely deployed and used today*.

As far as wireless industry is concerned, the die is already cast -
WAP, BlueTooth and UMTS are three future technologies.

cheers,

--brijesh
(my personal views only.)

---

From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 16:46:23 -0400

Brijesh Kumar wrote:

> The size of display has nothing to do
> with it.

Ah, so that's why WAP uses standard HTML?

--
/================================================================\
|John Stracke    | http://www.ecal.com |My opinions are my own.  |
|Chief Scientist |===============================================|
|eCal Corp.      |"What we have here is a failure to assimilate."|
[email-masked]|--Cool Hand Locutius                           |
\================================================================/

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 17:28:16 -0400

> > WAP might evolve into something more useful, but I don't see
> > how it will replace IP in any sense.
> 

the two are comperable in that WAP applications compete with 
traditional Internet applications, and people will sometimes
have to choose between "native Internet" and WAP as a means
of running their application (or support both)

> wireless channel with *limited bandwidth*, 

sure, but SMS was the limiting case on the bandwidth side.  were it
not for the need to support SMS it would have made a lot more sense to 
just use IP. (though not necessarily to use traditional IP transports or 
applications on top of it - but that would have at least been possible 
for those who were willing to suffer the expense/delay.)

display size might not have been a fundamental design constraint
of WAP's lower layers, but WAP applications are certainly designed 
to cope with limited display size, and the limitations of cellphone 
displays are often used as a justification for using WAP instead 
of IP based applications.

> are *widely deployed and used today*.

today, perhaps.  tomorrow is different.

> WAP, BlueTooth and UMTS are three future technologies.

an industry that believes its own marketing propaganda is quite often wrong.

Keith

---

From: Mark Atwood <[email-masked]>
Date: 21 Jun 2000 16:09:12 -0700

> devices, and existing IP based wire line applications.

So then obvious the Right Thing is to put an IP stack on each of those
devices. Then such "mediation" is unnecessary.

-- 
Mark Atwood   | It is the hardest thing for intellectuals to understand, that
[email-masked] | just because they haven't thought of something, somebody else
              | might. <http://www.friesian.com/rifkin.htm>
http://www.pobox.com/~mra

---

From: Steve Deering <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 16:53:43 -0700

>devices, and existing IP based wire line applications.

There are no "IP based wire line applications".  Applications based on IP
don't depend on, or know, or care that their packets flow over wires or
fibres or RF waves or IR waves or wet string, or any combination thereof.
That's one of the neat things about IP.

Steve

---

From: Bill Manning <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 100 18:23:08 -0700 (PDT)

% 
% At 4:16 PM -0400 6/21/00, Brijesh Kumar wrote:
% >WAP's goal is not to replace IP, but mediate between non-IP wireless
% >devices, and existing IP based wire line applications.
% 
% There are no "IP based wire line applications".  Applications based on IP
% don't depend on, or know, or care that their packets flow over wires or
% fibres or RF waves or IR waves or wet string, or any combination thereof.
% That's one of the neat things about IP.
% 
% Steve
% 

Hum,
	Did the IESG depricate IP over Avian Carrier when I blinked?
	And the draft on IP over seismic waves is due any day now.

-- 
--bill

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 02:33:58 +0100

> devices. Then such "mediation" is unnecessary.

but there may not be enough room in the 640k before one runs into the video
buffer. :-)

technical shortsightedness used as an excuse for an attempt to create a
monpolistic walled garden.  don't get too excited about it, other more ipish
mobile phone technologies are already passing wap.

don't you just love telephants?

randy

---

From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 07:07:43 +0200

>	And the draft on IP over seismic waves is due any day now.

Don't forget

1926 An Experimental Encapsulation of IP Datagrams on Top of ATM. J.
      Eriksson. April 1996. (Format: TXT=2969 bytes) (Status:
      INFORMATIONAL)

    paf

---

From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 14:02:56 +0200

At 13.37 +0200 00-06-22, Magnus Danielson wrote:
>I still havent found a working implementation of this. Any references?
>Did the channel selection ever get automated?

I know that Peter Deutch at then Bunyip was working on a slightly 
different, but similar, proposal which was to run IP over a string. I 
guess that if he is on this list, he can explain.

   paf

---

From: Magnus Danielson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 14:45:54 +0200

From: Patrik Fältström  <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: IP over MIME (was Re: WAP Is A Trap -- Reject WAP)
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 14:02:56 +0200

> guess that if he is on this list, he can explain.

I know of succesfull lab tests with running MPEG video over strings, for short
distances you can reach several megabits. The downside is that the distance
damping is great so it is not a solution for the last mile, it is more a
solution for the last meter or so. The benefit of this technology is that you
can hear the traffic load over the string as a side consequence of the
transmission mode. A good string has considerable more bandwidth than free air
transmissions. The good point about building networks over strings is that the
medium naturally causes the distance to be short so that the distance between
the boxes becomes smaller. This naturally brings down the feasable number of
boxes and the protocols can be simplified since you no longer have as sever
scaling problems. Excess bandwidth through the wire may cause heating, so one
has to select a string of suitable material or else it will convert itself to
a fire wire.

Cheers,
Magnus

---

From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 09:03:12 -0400

>         And the draft on IP over seismic waves is due any day now.

Security Considerations: since the most effective way to generate seismic
waves is with a nuclear device, users of this protocol can expect to be
secured by their governments for a very long time.

--
/==============================================================\
|John Stracke    | http://www.ecal.com |My opinions are my own.|
|Chief Scientist |=============================================|
|eCal Corp.      |Organ transplants are best left to the       |
[email-masked]|professionals.                               |
\==============================================================/

---

From: Magnus Danielson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 15:58:56 +0200

From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: IP over MIME (was Re: WAP Is A Trap -- Reject WAP)
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 09:03:12 -0400

> secured by their governments for a very long time.

This sounds like a protocol which would not run popular in California or else
they will communicate themselfs of the US west coast. Also, isn't the long
range devices under international non-spread agreements? Some implementations
is certainly under strict legal control due to their technology.

Will the draft cover the usage of Modified Time Interval Encoding (MTIE)?

Cheers,
Magnus

---

From: "Matt Crawford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 09:57:05 -0500

> 	And the draft on IP over seismic waves is due any day now.

Consider the possibilities of a neutrino beam -- no media costs and
lower latency than direct point-to-point fiber.

http://www-numi.fnal.gov:8875/overview/overview.html
http://www.hep.anl.gov/ndk/postscript/numil337_3.pdf  (page 5)
http://www-numi.fnal.gov:8875/fnal_minos/physics/Superposition1.html
http://www.hep.umn.edu/minos/images.html

---

From: Eric Brunner <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 12:22:39 -0400

> However, I am a firm believer that WAP will become what IP is to us today.

How nice to have firm belief-systems. What I write here are only my personal
opinions.

I posted Rohit's tour of the tangle when I was at Nokia Research last year.
As Phil pointed out in "The Mystery of the Missing Block Diagram", the WAP
gateway is imagined to be playing the cheery ringing tones of the Las Vegas
Polka. The urge to own the last mile seems beyond rational examination.

Having written XPG/1, and much of XPG/4.2, I experience the sensation of
amazement, even wonder, that a company, or a handful of companies, who have
a staggering installed base -- are disinterested in programatic APIs as a
competitive weapon, and instead position themselves in an unnecessary food
fight with the datagram industry -- the "wireless vs wireline" styling that
leaks out of market leach fields. Personally I'd trade the "last mile" for
the execution platform in a single clock cycle, but this may simply reflect
my X v MS (IBM, AT&T, resp.) experience as milage clearly varries.

A handset is one "M" short of being a 3M device. Needless interposition on
the service model makes it unnecessarily difficult to integrate. I agree
with Phil, the best set of bits to pour onto a 2M device (Symbian, Palm, ...)
is open-generica bits, not closed-(src/svc) bits. The core problem after all
is to make the device useful, to expand the service model, not to maximize
tolls for voice plus trivial digital dorkage.

Since the XXX crowd has managed to lead telephony (and some data) service
model development, I'll re-examine my beliefs when I see the XXX techies
start to run with WAP. I believe in their crystal balls ;-) 

Eric

---

From: Chuck Kaekel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 11:09:18 -0700

It's my understanding that disturbances in The Force
were actually routed  using an ancient precursor to IP.

C_____

>http://www.hep.umn.edu/minos/images.html

Chuck Kaekel
[email-masked]

---

From: "Brijesh Kumar" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 15:17:49 -0400

Chuck writes,

> were actually routed  using an ancient precursor to IP.
I don't know about it, but the myth goes that ET communicated with his
folks using IP :-). The captured packet trace is
"UndecodableDatalink:IPheader:TCPheader:"ET go home""

Cheers,

--brijesh

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 11:40:46 +0859 ()

> Will the draft cover the usage of Modified Time Interval Encoding (MTIE)?

The draft should also cover IP over Tsunami.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: Mahadevan Iyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 21:44:39 -0700 (PDT)

Probably, there is some universe out there made of AnTi-Matter and where
anti-packets are mostly routed using anti-IP, or in other words...ATM.
:)

---

From: "Bob Wise" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 20:18:02 -0600

If WAP doesn't replace IP, then why does the WAP protocol specification
include the protocol layers that are equivalent (and replacements for)
the IP layer?

-Bob

-----------
Bob Wise
Chief Architect
Vsys, Inc. - "The Softswitch Company"
www.vsys.com

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of
Mark Atwood
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 5:09 PM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]; 'Taylor, Johnny'; 'Donald E. Eastlake 3rd';
[email-masked]
Subject: Re: IP over MIME (was Re: WAP Is A Trap -- Reject WAP)

--
Mark Atwood   | It is the hardest thing for intellectuals to understand,
that
[email-masked] | just because they haven't thought of something, somebody
else
              | might. <http://www.friesian.com/rifkin.htm>
http://www.pobox.com/~mra

---

From: "Bob Wise" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 20:17:54 -0600

"Wireline IP applications" really is "Wireline VoIP applications"
in this context. What this means is that the application is either
replacing wireline applications, or is interoperting with PSTN
wireline applications.

VoIP implementations that interface with wireline networks have
different requirements and interfaces than those interfacing with
PSTN wireless applications.

In either case, it is certainly appropriate to consider that
mobility applications may have different constraints and requirements
than fixed applications.

Particularly in applications (like real-time voice), the application
may be very concerned that the underlying fabric is or is not capable
of delivering the necessary bandwidth, latency, etc.

-Bob

-----------
Bob Wise
Chief Architect

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Manning [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2893 4:44 PM
To: Steve Deering
Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked];
[email-masked]; [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: IP over MIME (was Re: WAP Is A Trap -- Reject WAP)

% 

Hum,

-- 
--bill