Summary of service providers 10/11 teleconference

["Mark Day" <markday@cisco.com>]

As attendees at the Oct 3 Boston meeting probably remember, a number of
service providers expressed interest in some form of early-adopter effort at
content peering and interoperability, and agreed to have a conference call
on Oct. 11th. This experimental activity is distinct from the discussion
about a framework for standards, but is complementary to it.  We would like
for our experiments to be compatible with the developing framework, and for
experience from experiments to feed into the framework.

Represented on the call were Activia, Apogee Networks, AT&T, Cisco, Digital
Island, Genuity, iScale, NetSat Express, Shortest Path Networks, and
Speedera.  We spent part of the call on introductions, then the majority of
the time talking about what we could reasonably expect to achieve and in
what time frame.

The rough consensus was that we would pursue some form of interop
demonstration among "lab networks" (i.e. small-scale networks without
affecting live customers), with a target completion date of the IETF meeting
in December. Our first action item was to identify the approximate size and
layout of the lab networks each player would make available for the demo.
We will be examining AT&T's scheme for inter-network steering of traffic to
understand whether we believe it can be a basis for the demo.

Another rough consensus was that the people on the call should be limited to
actively-participating service providers, where that definition in practice
probably means someone who is contributing a lab network to the demo.  There
was a sense that other parties would be valuable additions later but could
not be of much help in the initial tasks.

We targeted Monday (the 16th) as a deadline for people to identify the
resources they can make available, in advance of another teleconference on
Wednesday (the 18th).  People should be sending that information to me, so I
can send it out to the other participants.

Because I am very late in writing up these notes, I recognize that many
potential participants who missed the call will not be able to get their
commitments to me by that deadline. I'd be happy to accept a "best guess" of
resources that might be available, as well as a date by which a more solid
commitment can be made to the group.

--Mark