RE: Status of the GMPLS extensions for SONET and SDH control draft

["Mak, L (Leen)" <lmak@lucent.com>]

Eric,

Last week you gave a nice overview of the Status of the 
GMPLS extensions for SONET and SDH control draft.
I'd like to comment on some statements.
Excerpts from your email are marked by ">". 
My comments are marked by "Comment".

Leen Mak.

> There is up to now no reason to consider transparency and 
> concatenation as 
> being proprietary extensions given the support that these 
> features had from
> the community. 

Comment: what do you mean by community? I have seen only 
a few vendors and no operators speak in favor of this idea on 
the mailing lists. 

> They are implemented/being implemented by many

Comment: can you please substantiate this claim. I would
be happy to know which vendors you are referring to.

> Simply a few people argued that we need new ITU-T standards 
> to support these features,

Comment: to me it appears too that we need new ITU-T standards
to support these features. It is a common industry interest 
to have a clear definition of what is in SDH and what is out.
Even if a feature would be "negotiable" between NEs, there
should be an agreed standard describing what you get if an
NE says "yes" to a request for support of such feature.
The natural home for this is G.707. 

> 
> Please, carefully read the following text that clarifies the 
> contiguous concatenation part of the draft and that 
> introduces one simple new concatenation type.

Comment: this is exactly what should not be done: "introduce
one simple new concatenation type" in an IETF doc.

> Arbitrary contiguous concatenation (as described it in the 
> proposed text)
> don't need any standard, it is just a way to use SDH/SONET. 
> It is already
> implemented since a while by many manufacturers in legacy 
> equipment's. 

Comment: how many? Please substantiate this claim

> Transparency
> at the NNI between two manufacturers needs an agreement to 
> interoperate.
> This agreement can be achieved in very different ways: 
> through the use of a
> standard, an implementation agreement made by a forum, or an 
> implementation
> agreement between two manufacturers (e.g. at the request of 
> an operator).

Comment: Currently, interoperability according to the extended 
concatenation schemes requires obviuously an agreement between 
vendors and/or operators OUTSIDE the standards world (simply 
because these schemes are not in G.707). 
It would be only logical to let the signalling required for them 
be part of the same agreement - OUTSIDE the standards world.