[arin-ppml] OAM v MPLS

[John Curran]

> On Mar 10, 2011, at 12:13 PM, Rudolph Daniel wrote:
> 
> I am trying to understand the significance of the ITU's decision to promote OAM as opposed to the IETF's MPLS as a networking standard.
> Any comments

Rudi - 
 
   That's probably a little too far from PPML's charter to be a good topic for 
   this mailing list...   There's quite a bit of existing discussion of the MPLS 
   OAM difference of opinion over on LightReading in this article:
   <http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=204977&>  and
   the associated links that follow the article.  The main IETF mailing list
   also has some discussion of the topic.

   Short version is that the IETF and ITU agreed on an approach to a single
   OAM standard for MPLS, and the IETF has been working on it (albeit slower 
   than expected) and it appears that some of the vendors in the ITU community 
   continued to ship product based on the ITU version in the meantime.  This 
   ultimately came to a head last month, when the ITU Study Group 15 decided
   to adopt the ITU original proposal despite its earlier agreement with the IETF
   to work on a single joint standard.  Implications could include interoperability
   issues for large-multivendor MPLS networks, and general concern about the
   strength of commitment behind any other agreements that the ITU might enter
   in the future.  This is the aspect of the dispute that is disturbing for ARIN, and 
   requires careful thought when considering offers from the ITU to "work together" 
   on any Internet number resource activities.

FYI,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN