Current mood:

disappointed

IEEE standards access

For a while, IEEE had the great program called Get IEEE 802. It allowed the most "free" access to standards of the 802.* range, including 802.3 (most of what we call Ethernet), 802.11 (most of what we call wlan). The only thing they required from the downloaders is to state their "user type", like standards developer, student, etc. Although very hard to map "curious person interested in networking" to their terminology -- this is common with most types of official instutions.

The other somewhat developer friendly standards organization is ETSI, responsible for many of the GSM and DECT related standards, they have a bit awkward registration and download mechanism, but still a pack of informative standards. The other people however, mainly ISO/IEC/ITU are not cheap, and many of their standards are just as uninformative as at these "cheap" orgs.

Another limit at IEEE to the access was that you cannot download too recent standards, the arbitrary limit was set to six months. This worked quite well for "curious persons interested in networking", when you allow me to represent this group. It certainly is useful to get to know the internals of switches, the minor details of the spanning tree protocol, etc. However, the last standard to pass this limit was 802.16e-2005. Interestingly, it's not trivial to discover when a standard is released, 802.16e-2005 was apparently issued in February 2006, that's why it went "free" in September this year.

However, for the last few months, there were three more documents on the waiting list, two including updates to the VLAN related standards. What irked me is all of them are apparently dated 2005 in their names. As you can see, it has nothing to do with their release date, which is stated as "2006", if you click on any one of them. I had hoped that 2007 being so close, maybe some of them can be freed any day now. I am not really interested in changes in the MAC Sublayer of the High Rate WPANs, for example. Yes, wireless stuff, but I'm rather confident 802.11, ethernet (and related 802 standards), bluetooth, usb, gsm, isdn/pstn networking covers such a large area that I won't be needing a device with 802.15. But VLANs do interest me.

Today I discovered that they have cleared this issue of ever sliding deadlines by sliding them even more: "Effective 1 January 2007 new IEEE 802® standards will be included in the program after they have been published in PDF for twelve months."

What this means to me that I'll be even more limited in "curiosity" access to these standards. There were probably too many "freeloaders" willing to wait a few months to get the standards. And you can also say I did nothing useful with my access, and very few people did, there's not a 802.1w (Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol) implementation for free operating systems. It was even approved in 2001, so we had quite some time to do it.

What this also means that the IEEE standards are quite ahead of their time, you probably can even manufacture useful devices implementing only the protocols standardized more than a few months ago. So they try to artificially increase demand for the expensive version of the new standards. Obvious action, but maybe "cheap" manufacturers still won't care about them even if its just a few hundreds or tens of bucks to buy, so what they really have introduced is another period when the newest useful features are just not available in many devices. Worth it?