[Fax] Amendment 1 to ITU T.37 Not Approved
James Rafferty <jrafferty <at> worldnet.att.net>
1999-05-07 16:17:57 GMT
Folks,
This is a followup to my report on the ITU-T Study Group 8 meeting that was
held in March and April.
At that time, the final status of the proposed Amendment 1 to ITU-T T.37
was on hold, pending a 4 week review period by two countries, the United
States and Germany. The proposed amendment adds text to T.37 which
defines the "Full Mode" for store and forward Internet fax, via reference
to the new IETF Internet fax RFCs (RFC 2530-2532) and some older RFCs (for
DSN, MDN and ESMTP).
An ITU "decision" on a document requires unanimous consent for approval.
As it turns out, after a review conducted during this 4 week period,
Germany has voted No. The US vote is a conditional Yes (requesting that
text be added to T.37 clarifying that embedded references in IETF RFCs
listed as "Work In Progress" are not normative). So, the net result of
this review process is that the amendment 1 to T.37 does not pass at this
time.
Per my understanding, the next SG8 meeting at which the amendment could be
approved (with minor corrections as applicable), is to be held early next
year.
In the remainder of this note, I will offer my perspective on what happened
and why, and also discuss where the IETF Fax WG and the ITU Q4 can go from
here to complete this approval process.
I personally believe that this result is unfortunate for the marketplace,
since a joint IETF and ITU endorsement of new standard approaches carries
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