CircleID

Anyone who doesn't want to spend hundreds of dollars to decode and read proprietary formats can download a free Word viewer here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdate/CD011197531033.aspx

One bug fix? There are no silver bullets. We all know that. It should not be surprising that PSTNS are using IP and that a convergence is taking place. This has been happening for a while now.

However, that doesn't mean there cannot be improvements for everyone's networked experience on a global level either from an acceptance on how to solve certain problems; or mutual agreements on how to run and manage networks in a number of different fora.

Thus it's far more than simply making sure that CIDR prefixes are assigned properly and allocated, which is about what you need to have trivial connectivity among BGP speakers.

You simply need protocols which consistently use unique numbers. But as soon as people start incorporating more virtual services like naming; which are involved with issues like copyright, (which is more than connectivity) the Internet fails to deliver because the problems are primarily social, not technical. The concept of information society is that we are now much more virtual, and the baggage that previously was not in the more formless world of interconnected networks has now arrived, since it's no longer such a new thing, and has to be judged against other established services.

The ITU has been working on these problems for years, and anticipated many of the problems that would arise from a global information society before most people were able to ping their nearest router. And that's why many competent engineers who helped invent the internet are so concerned and vocal regarding social issues impacted by networking. It's not their area of expertise, but they are trying it out.

There's a concept of administrative security domains which extend from global to local.

Human rights are a global concern, how you apply policy to your local network is a local concern. But if you fail to implement security in an effective way on your connection, and host a spam zombie, then it again becomes a larger network concern.

The DOD internet was never meant to be anything other than a testing bed for the development of NGN, at which time better services would be deployed. However, around 1990 most Internet engineers figured the next step was a bunch of nonsense and fought it tooth and nail. Rapid growth was traded for quality. As a result we got fairly easy to implement, and fairly difficult to secure protocols based on rough consensus and running code. A union of networks is really stretching the concept of mutually agreed upon pragmatic route peering to something which it is not.

Those engineers won, and what we have now is the result of that sizzling growth that became the internet bubble that sprang from regional networks that started peering with each other without the lmiting overhead of the acceptable use policy at the CIX.

Some people don't mind the garbage slowing down their connections, others want quality of service, but with their freedoms intact.

This layering of social concerns onto the network has been inherent from the beginning, because connectivity promotes dialogue and can sometimes break down political borders between people.

But technology alone is not a promoter of freedom, it can liberate or oppress equally. 

So we can say, fairly, one can't use a network to traffic in humans, and there is no local safe haven where that is permissable, because this is unacceptable, or to launder money, etc.

Connectivity per se has increasingly become a commodity, value added services are a way to improve that situation because they fit what people want.

This is why the current Internet is termed the "commodity" internet and there will be further developments to bring about NGN services that are more equitably distributed globally and can carry more useful data; precisely because of end to end QOS.

On anyone's "internal" network the ability to restrict such garbage is much greater, as well to apply specific policies. However, there are policies which are not at all facist, which re-territorialize the landscape to open up lines of potential which in fact might prove to be beneficial.

If there's any question as to whether routing prefixes are somewhat centered geographically, look at:

http://www.caida.org/analysis/geopolitical/bgp2country/bgp_20030918_1280x1707.gif

Part 1 (due to length limits).

The purpose of this note is not to defend the paper that Ross Rader criticizes, but to provide some complementary facts regarding ITU.

First of all, Mr Rader frequently uses expressions such as "the ITU is under the impression", thus treating ITU as if it were a person.  In fact, ITU is a complex membership organization.  ITU's membership uses formal processes and procedures to agree views and those agreed views are published as Recommendations, Resolutions, international treaties, etc.  The paper that Mr Rader criticizes is a staff input to a particular ITU body.  That paper has not been approved by the ITU membership and does not represent an "ITU view".

Mr Ross states: "The internet works because there are clear separations between transport technology, interconnection technology and application technology." It appears to me that the same is true of all telecommunication technologies.  I also seem to recall that one of the first formally agreed international definitions of the various separate layers was the OSI model, a joint IEC-ISO-ITU standard.

Mr Ross states: "Let's not forget what the internet actually is—a combination of privately and publicly owned (mostly private nowadays) and independently controlled networks that interconnect using a common protocol." The same is true of all telecommunication networks, in particular the telephone network, whether fixed or mobile.

Mr Ross states: "The phone company, and therefore the ITU, is in the business of interconnect".  I'm not sure why he equates the ITU with telephone operators.  The ITU was founded in 1865 to provide international coordination for telegraphy, and subsequently was asked to deal with certain aspects of the international coordination of practially all other telecommuniation technologies, see:
http://www.itu.int/aboutitu/overview/history.html

The ITU's private sector members (over 600) include all sorts of companies that are not primarily providers of telephone service, see:

http://www.itu.int/cgi-bin/htsh/mm/scripts/mm.list?_search=SEC&_languageid=1

Mr Ross states: "… there are other choices available that does not include the telco, and by extension the ITU. Radio, satellite, microwave, cable - there are a multitude of almost perfect substitutes that we can avail ourselves of."

International coordination of radio frequencies and satellite slots is performed by ITU, see:

http://www.itu.int/ITU-R/

In fact, worldwide useability of WI-FI is due in large measure to the fact that the ITU Member States have agreed, in the Radio Regulations, that the relevant frequency spectra should be unlicensed world-wide.

The most widely used cable-modem standards are ITU-T Recommendations. So are ADSL and related standards.  For more information on the ITU's involvement in IP-based networks, please see:

http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/ip/index.phtml

Mr Ross states: "The ITU aspires to a network management and oversight role".  The ITU's goals are clearly specified in its Constitution, see:

http://www.itu.int/aboutitu/basic-texts/constitution/chapter1/chapter01_01.html

The first goal is "to maintain and extend international cooperation among all its Member States for the improvement and rational use of telecommunications of all kinds;". 

The Preamble of the Constitution starts by "fully recognizing the sovereign right of each State to regulate its telecommunication", and states that the object of the ITU is to "facilitate peaceful relations, international cooperation among peoples and economic and social development by means of efficient telecommunication services"

Mr Ross states: "[ITU] oversees that world telecommunications infrastructure".  It is correct that ITU performs certain international coordination tasks that have been agreed by its membership.  Personally, I doubt that the tasks performed by ITU could be qualified as "overseeing the world telecommunications infrastructure".  On the other hand, it is true that the national regulatory agencies that are members of ITU do, in most countries, have the task of overseeing their national telecommunications infrastructure.

Part 2.

Mr Ross goes on to single out certain well-known cases of fraud or abuse.  But combating those types of fraud or abuse is either a commercial matter, taken care of by the concerned private operators, or a national matter, taken care of by the concerned national regulator or consumer protection agencies.

Concerning re-routeing of calls and abusive Internet auto-diallers, the ITU membership has agreed that measures should be taken at the international level as well as at the national level, and ITU-T has just initiated a project in this area, see TSB Circular 9 at:

http://www.itu.int/md/meetingdoc.asp?type=sitems&lang=e&parent=T05-TSB-CIR-0009

The initial step is to encourage reporting of potential misuse. Further work on measures to combat the misuse will follow, see WTSA Resolution 20 at:

http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/wtsa/resolutions.html

Mr Ross states that "NGN is a facist vision".  According to my dictionary, facism is "a philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism".  I doubt that the ITU's membership would recognize itself in that definition or agree with that characterization of the NGN project.

Best,
Richard Hill
Counsellor, ITU-T SG2 and SG4

I think the question here comes down to service models, in which IP was designed with an eye towards end-to-end communication, towards fate-sharing, and towards very clean (but imperfect) layering.  The traditional telephony service model relies on heavily mediated communications and signaled connection establishment.  While I can understand why someone might want to do it that way, I can't understand why they'd want to use IP as the base protocol - it's simply a terrible fit.  It's been popping out in frankly bizarro service brokerage models that are completely disconnected from the way packets are routed in IP.  They simply can't work without heavy manual configuration, or, as several ITU participants have suggested, "we'll just hack up BGP."

At any rate, I think the challenge here is how to move forward with a plausible business model that respects the internet's design principles, and to how avoid trying to hammer incompatible communication models on top of it.

As for layering, it's one thing to have a layering model and another to use it.  I think the serious layering violations in SS7 speak for themselves.