While agreeing wholeheartedly with Paul Jones's reply to Francois Menard I side with Tom's in his conclusion that the Megaco/H.248 collaboration has been a success. I would go further, and say I think it has been an outstanding achievement, considering the odds that were stacked against it.

I would list among these:

1. Deep philosophical differences of approach between the two Standards bodies in the way a Standard emerges and the decision processes involved,

2. Strongly held technical beliefs on both sides; arising partly from 'religion' and partly from conflicting strategic objectives,

2. Vested commercial interests on the part of some of the key players,

3. A marketing campaign going on in the background, aimed at replacing H.323 with SIP/SDP,

To talk of mistrust and suspicion is to grossly simplify the situation.

Having said all this, I would like to thank and congratulate all involved for bringing this effort to such a successful conclusion. In particular, I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to Tom for the way he has negotiated all these obstacles with patience and good humour and for the way he has straddled two very different cultures and two very different processes.

I would also like to thank John Segers for the long hours of frustrating work involved in producing a well written and well structured document from the amorphous scratchings he inherited. Its a thankless task being an ITU editor and I think John deserves a special thanks, particularly for the 48 hours or more that he went without sleep during the meeting to get the final version of the document ready.

Despite all these problems, I believe we will see a lot more of this type of co- operation. Why, because its the only approach that makes sense. The market demands interoperability in the area of VoIP and this can only be achieved by collaboration between the two Standards bodies involved.

Going forward, I would suggest that an MOU is drawn up early in the process not at the end. A detailed MOU is not something to apologise for, its just good business practice, and a practice that results in the minimum of misunderstandings and mistrust.

Finally, let's not let the process(es) on each side get in the way of progress. I think the less process involved the better. A document should be approved when consensus agree its ready for approval. Two sets of beaurocratic hurdles don't help matters, they just slow things down.

Mike Buckley

____________________ Begin Original Message ___________________________ Date: Sun Feb 27 19:43:19 -0500 2000 From: internet!NORTELNETWORKS.COM!taylor (Tom-PT Taylor) Subject: In Defense Of Cooperation To: internet!MAILBAG.INTEL.COM!ITU-SG16 Content-Type: multipart Content-Length: 7439

Paul Jones used the term "H.248/Megaco fiasco", and Dale Skran was quite intemperate in his criticism of the joint effort when he spoke in Geneva. I was not in a position to raise much of a defense there, because it would have conflicted with Glen's positioning of the H.248 work as stable. Now that that issue is water under the bridge, I would like to suggest that it really has been quite a successful project. I don't think we should go at it in quite the same way in the future, but we should not come away totally discouraged about the prospects for IETF/ITU-T cooperation.

Here are bases for my conclusion:

We have been technically successful, and what we have created is better than it would have been if created in either body separately. To be specific, we retained a great deal of the thinking and experience which went into MGCP, but escaped the limitations MGCP's connection model imposed on the use of different bearer types and multiple media.

There is a perception that the IETF decision model is lacking because so much had to be done at the ITU-T meetings. However, the grueling effort put in at the latter resulted partly because of fundamental conflict to which Q.13-14 has been unaccustomed (Monterey and much of Red Bank in particular) and partly because there was so much to cover. This may have given the impression that the IETF didn't do anything on their watch, but we did work through a lot of material. Moreover, both Q. 14/16 and Megaco made a host of decisions which have shaped the final protocol.

I have pleaded guilty to a failure to complete IETF process in timely fashion. There was a brief window of opportunity in early December when it seemed that the list was quieting down. If I had made Last Call at that point, the long list of issues which was contributed into the Geneva meeting would instead have been forced into the open at an early enough point that IETF process could still have been completed in time for the Geneva meeting. I consider this to be a tactical failure, in that real work was done in the intervening month and a half, and the protocol specification is the better for it.

We have come to a point where SG 16 is thoroughly mistrustful of the IETF as a partner, and has shown this distrust by negotiating a contract for further progress on H.248/Megaco down to the last detail. The pity is that I could see that SG 16 was overly anxious to do its part, from Santiago onwards. We were not really ready for determination at that point, and we were not ready for decision coming out of Red Bank. I can understand that SG 16 feels betrayed because the IETF was not finished in time, but the fact is that the job was bigger than the schedule allowed for.

This is why, if I am ever involved in a project like this again, I will insist that the IETF and ITU-T working together create an IETF Proposed Standard before determination ever happens. The opportunity for false expectations and artificially tight deadlines will thus never arise, and both sides will be the happier for it.

Tom Taylor Advisor -- Emerging Carrier IP Standards E-mail: taylor@nortelnetworks.com (internally, Tom-PT Taylor) Phone and FAX: +1 613 736 0961