[Old-standards] Re: List of Old Standards to be retired

[Brian E Carpenter]

Hi Bill,

Copies cut down drastically.

Here's a data point. I just checked that Swisscom still
offers Internet access over ISDN (of course they do) and their
current recommended modem is from Zyxel. The data sheet states
that it supports PPP (of course it does). They don't cite RFC 1618 but
what else could it be? And the other end is certainly not Zyxel.

ftp://ftp.zyxel.com/ousb/document/ousb_V1.0_Datasheet.pdf

    Brian

William Allen Simpson wrote:
> Carsten Bormann wrote:
> 
>>> RFC1618       PPP over ISDN
>>
>>
>>
>> We had a short discussion about this in pppext.
>>
>> The gist was: The document is pretty bad (partly because things were 
>> murky in 1994, but also because it was written by Martians that had no 
>> space ship to take them to the ISDN planet), 
> 
> 
> (sorry, I've given up reading IETF lists regularly, but I was pointed at
> this comment.)
> 
> The document was written in 1992-1993 based on using real equipment
> over Ameritech lines in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  In those days, I was so
> personally dedicated to the IETF that I actually moved to Ann Arbor to
> test and use it, as it was the first place in the state to offer ISDN.
> I've heard that things differ in other places in the world.  But other
> places in the world participated in the lively design and implementation
> discussion.
> Without that discussion, it would have been octet-sync only, but others
> felt the need for bit-sync.  Moreover, that bit-sync be preferred over
> octet-sync, as some places in the world would actually lose octet
> alignment over time.  Horrors!  Now that backbones use fiber this
> probably happens a lot less, but those were the realities of the day.
> 
> The specification was implemented by me in at least 2 product lines. 
> I've heard that it was implemented by others as well.
> 
> But, I've never seen results of any interoperability testing, and thus
> it was never advanced toward standard.  Most folks seemed to just buy
> the same vendor for both ends of the link.
> 
>> but some parts of it do describe what currently shipping, actively 
>> marketed products do (and should do) in this domain.
> 
> 
> And that needs to be documented on the PPP list.
> 
> I found the nroff, and would be happy to document interoperability,
> should there be any.
>