|
JIM BARTHOLD
Digital Subscriber Line. Slowly they turn, step by step, inch by inch ...
The DSL Forum's push to set an industry-wide customer premises equipment (CPE) standard now includes a CPE Autoconfiguration Working Group that, at its first meeting, created four more groups.
"We spent a good part of the meeting making sure there was pretty strong agreement on the actual requirements for the solution we're going to come up with," says group chairman John Stephens.
This led to the four teams "that are going to work independently of any of the other work groups at the DSL Forum," Stephens says.
The other thing the group decided was to meet "face-to-face" in Swinden, England, Nov. 2 with hopes that before the group's next quarterly meeting in Portland, Ore., in early December "a lot of progress" will have been made.
"For people to get together and meet face-to-face ... shows the Forum is really pushing to get this work accomplished quickly in order to move the industry forward," Stephens says.
What, exactly, is the CPE Autoconfiguration Working Group trying to solve?
"We're not inventing new protocols that you're going to have to go write," Stephens says. "What we're saying is there are three or four different ways of solving this problem. We're going to recommend that in these deployment scenarios you use these technologies."
Most vendors, he says, already have building blocks in place, although they tend to line up in proprietary combinations.
"What we're trying to do is select an industry standard for that combination," he says, pointing to a possible resolution by as early as next March.
"We're shooting to have straw ballots ready by the end of the Portland meeting, which means we'd go letter ballot by the end of the Vancouver meeting, which is in March," he says.
Back to this issue
|
