The standards process is broken
By: Marius Vermeulen, Cisco technical specialist at Tarsus Technologies

19 November 2009

The networking and communications industry last month breathed a sigh of relief when the IEEE finally ratified and brought into existence the long-overdue 802.11n wireless networking standard.

And this was mainly because it seems as if most vendors were right on the money when it came to how they implemented the draft versions of the standard in hardware they started selling ages ago.

That the rest of the ICT market at large carried on rather unconcerned - simply raising an eyebrow when or if it noticed that the label on networking hardware had changed from '802.11 Pre-n' or '802.11 Draft-n' to '802.11n' - speaks volumes about how broken the standards process is that the industry has been using up until now.

The 802.11n standard has been in the works for a little over seven years and products based on the early pre-ratified drafts of the standard have been available for purchase for about half that time.

In anyone's books, that is a very long time.

It means that the standards process is taking so long to implement that vendors are comfortable in taking a grilling from their customers when different brands of merchandise (roughly adhering to the standard) don't work perfectly together.

And what's even more concerning is that it means that customers are more than prepared to take the risk of encountering interoperability errors, just so that they can stay on the cutting edge.

If this is how the behaviour in the market has been for the past while, is the standards process even needed then? The obvious answer to that question is 'yes'.

However, if the way that standards are being decided on and debated over results in it taking seven years for vendors to get to a point of ratification, something is broken.

The trend over the past couple of years has been for standards to take longer and longer to get out into the open. And if that continues, it's going to take even more time for future standards to be formed and accepted - only leading us to an environment of relative lawlessness, at least in the eyes of the 'interoperability police.'

What's the solution then?

My personal belief is that vendors are trying to do too much in one go, something that only complicates issues and leads to lengthy standards processes.

Vendors participating in the making of standards should break things down into smaller pieces - after all, if you're going to eat an elephant, you do it one bite at a time.

So to use a practical example, 802.11n should have rather been broken down into a number of smaller standards, which could have been debated over, decided on and implemented more speedily than the seven years it took to ratify the much larger standard.

Either that or set firm timeframes, like the Linux community does for its kernel refreshes. This way, vendors and their customers could expect a new standard to be ratified every two-to-three years - and for new features to be included in that standard if deemed mature enough.

Right now, however, the industry is on a slippery slope and with things taking longer and longer to get finalised, by releasing pre-approved hardware and software, the industry is opening itself and its customers up to more risk than is healthy.