Is it time for a revolution?

We state that – the authors co-signed write this in their own capacities, and the questions posed below and the thoughts behind them are those of the authors and any individual or organization that chooses to explicitly back our position here, and should not be attributed otherwise.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they look at the status quo and ask: is what is currently occurring for the good of the collective, or is it merely serving the interests of a single dominant player? Dependent on the answer to that question, the question must then be asked – is it time to force a change?

This is the question we find ourselves asking with regards to the IETF. Over the last few years, we have seen the landscape in the routing field dominated entirely by one vendor. This has led to forcing every other IETF contributor to play their tune whenever that one vendor has a stake, or risk having their proposals being left to wither on the vine. There are several examples of this; it has become endemic in the SPRING working group; we see similar happening elsewhere in the IETF. We are concerned that it will be only a matter of time before we see this behavior creeping into the IDR, LSR and other working groups. It seems that the will of the operators/other vendors is being left behind.

And so – while we are not going to go into specifics – because enough has been written and said in so many forums already – we are going to ask the rest of the vendors, yes, we are looking at you Juniper, Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, ZTE, and so the list continues – are you content to continue to have your future, and the future of your customers dictated by one vendor in the routing space?

To the operators, both big and small, are you prepared to let your tomorrow be dictated by the whims of a single vendor? Where thoughts and ideas are all entirely dictated by one vendor in the routing space? Are you prepared to have your own innovation hampered or otherwise ignored unless you can get the buy in of ONE vendor? Are you ready to admit it?

We need to ask ourselves a simple question – are we content with the current situation in the IETF? Is it time for us to say enough is enough and demand a standards revolution? We leave that to each reader to decide.

The undersigned believe that the time has come to say enough is enough! The Internet we know today was built from the bottom up which is precisely the approach we need to return to, instead of the interests of a single vendor based on their stock performance on the Nasdaq.

Andrew Alston

Sander Steffann

Fernando Gont

Jan Zorz