Apologies to Alison -- I don't have her E-mail address.
Megaco met for one session on Thursday morning. The agenda included a review of status, a discussion of the future of work on development of Megaco/H.248, review of work items in progress, and review of potential new work items. The main points out of the status review were that we must close on Last Call items within the next week to make the base protocol documentation available for the April IESG meeting, and that only MIB development remains out of the original charter work items.
Discussion of how the IETF wishes to relate to future development of the Megaco/H.248 protocol brought out the following points: -- painful as it has been, we wish to remain fully involved in development of the base protocol at every stage -- leaving that aside, it is desirable for interoperability that package development be coordinated to minimize unnecessary proliferation -- there was a strong consensus that in future work, ITU-T determination of jointly developed documents should truly indicate that these documents are technically stable, with rigorous change control applied thereafter to ensure that changes are restricted to clarifications and error corrections.
The consensus was therefore that Megaco should continue to operate, though perhaps at a lower level of activity. It will be necessary to draw up a new charter for the Working Group, and the Chair has been tasked with drawing up a process document to form the basis of a permanent agreement with the ITU groups with whom we cooperate. (This document will be offered to the list for discussion before being passed to the AD.) It was noted in later discussion that within the present organization of the ITU-T we will need to work with Study Group 11 as well as SG 16.
A first engineer-to-engineer interoperability event is being planned, tentatively set for August, somewhere in North America. Nortel will set up an implementor's E-mail list and web site. We welcome any TIPHON initiative to develop an H.248 PICS.
Notes on existing work items: -- the suggestion from discussion was that each package (including those currently in H.248 Annex E) will be published as a separate RFC. Megaco- or ITU-initiated packages will typically be standards-track, but this decision can be made on a per-package basis. -- discussion of the IPPhone profile brought out the following points: Megaco will not initiate the development of profiles, but will typically become involved as technical consultants in the final stages of turning mature documents into Informational RFCs. The IPPhone draft itself will probably be recycled once more in response to list comments, then sent to WG Last Call, around mid-April. -- the NAS package work continues to be a matter both of controversy and of an apparently low level of general interest. It will be fleshed out to meet the published Megaco requirements. We are looking to WG Last Call in mid- to late April. -- MIB work has begun to take off. A recycled draft with a substantial amount of content should be available within the next couple of weeks. We are looking toward WG Last Call toward the end of the month. It was noted that each package will probably engender a corresponding MIB.
A number of potential new work areas were reviewed. These will be discussed on the list, with a view to identifying specific WG work items over the next month. -- ISDN-related work should be coordinated with Study Group 11 -- additional packages proposed in draft-brown-supplpkgs-00.txt will be generic in intent, although in detail some aspects may be specific to North America. The work should be coordinated with Study Group 16 in particular, and possibly also Study Group 11.
Work on adding ATM capability to SDP is in progress. The work is being taken to MMUSIC (who are prepared to supervise it -- there was a question of whether they would refer it back to Megaco.)
A final presentation on the potential application of H.248 to the control of UMTS terminals included a request for help in development of the implied call flows. An I-D will be submitted and can be discussed on the list.
As a personal note, I cannot guarantee E-mail connectivity over the next week -- my modem does not seem to agree with most Australian telephone circuits. I will be back in full operation April 8.
Tom Taylor Advisor -- Emerging Carrier IP Standards E-mail: taylor@nortelnetworks.com (internally, Tom-PT Taylor) Phone and FAX: +1 613 736 0961