R:Megaco Meeting Summary

[Tosco Federico]

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 at nortelnetworks.com (internally, Tom-PT Taylor)
Phone and FAX: +1 613 736 0961

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