On Mar 29, 2006, at 10:56 AM, Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
We could ask the IEEE, since the relationship between the WiFi
folks and IEEE 802.11 seems to be somewhat similar.
One of the problems I see is that many of the industry associations
(SIP Forum, IPv6 forum, to name two I'm somewhat familiar with)
tend to focus on service providers, not consumers. But an
organization such as the SIP Forum could provide a "VoIP-optimized"
label for NAT boxes and maybe even ISPs.
I'm a board member of the SIP Forum, so I'd like to respond to
Henning. (I'm speaking as an individual here who happens to be on the
SIP Forum board so these are personal views neither discussed with
nor agreed to by the rest of the board. Ditto for the IAB.)
The SIP Forum is a creature of our members, which today are almost
exclusively service providers and equipment vendors. We try to
respond to the pain points they bring us and add value by bridging
the gap between protocol standardization through the IETF and needs
in the market. So far, we've been pretty successful at running
interoperability testing through the SIPIT program, and coming up
with deployment and "feature bundling" specifications in areas like
hooking up SIP-based enterprise VoIP systems to service providers who
are offering PSTN origination and termination services.
The question of how to help the consumer market segment is one we are
stumped on, for a number of reasons. First, there is no obvious
advocate for the needs of consumers among our membership. Second, few
to none of the vendors who sell consumer gear (e.g. Linksys, Netgear,
Sony, Apple) are members. Third, much of that market segment is
driven by offshore manufacturers who have little incentive to lead in
engineering. Their expertise is in channel and brand management, and
in minimizing all costs, including engineering (not to mention forum
memberships...).
That said, a number of us believe that we are having a modest effect.
For example, in the enterprise interconnect specification, we worked
very hard to make sure straightforward interconnect worked without
mandating extra firewall, NAT or B2BUA functionality.
The idea of having the SIP Forum sponsor work to at least partially
drain the NAT/firewall traversal swamp is a good one. So - seeing as
this is on the IETF public list, let me offer a plea: if you work
with or build SIP products for consumers, JOIN THE SIP FORUM and help
us put together a program in our Technical Working Group to address
these issues. We are driven by our members. Membership is free for
individuals and of modest cost for companies.
Cheers, Dave Oran
Thus, I think we need a separate organization (or work with a
separate organization) that does branding and certification. It's
hard to buy a non-WiFi device in stores today; the equivalent
consumer assurance needs to be true for core consumer and small-
business network devices, and possibly services.
I don't know how this would work, but if it could be made to work,
that might be very helpful.
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