Free access to ITU-T Standards

It was interesting to see that the ITU has opened up free access to their standards documents.

Twenty years ago, the ITU documents were only available in expensive printed sets that only large corporate libraries could afford. The document sets were color-coded (I remember yellow, red, and blue), issued every four years, and they took up an entire shelf. Given the scarcity and cost of the ITU documents, if you were a network protocol developer in the telco or (now dead) OSI worlds, part of your regular job involved the necessary sleuth work, bribery, and bartering to get the relevant standards you needed. It was never easy, even if you did work for a company that owned a document set.

In stark contrast, the Internet Engineering Task Force RFC documents and drafts were always open, available via FTP. You never had to worry about someone lifting your printed copy of the SMTP (email exchange) protocol spec, for example, while you were away; if that happened, you just downloaded another. Attempting to build upon the very succesful IETF model, Carl Malumud based an entire book on a worldwide quest in the early nineties to have these ITU standards opened up, including a visit to the then-stodgy ITU headquarters in Switzerland. His trips to emerging countries, most still based on dial-up or low speed leased lines at the time revealed that there was great interest in some of the ITU standards, for implementation and experimenting, but they were just too expensive to acquire. With ITU permission, Malamud and Dr. Michael Schwartz even setup their own ITU document retrieval FTP server at the University of Colorado for a trial period.

17 years later, the ITU documents are freely downloadable. In addition to running code and interoperability testing, free document access is one of the reasons why the IETF protocols are dominant today. Perhaps the ITU decision is 20 years too late?

Posted at 04:43PM Sep 25, 2007 by Peter Schow in Industry  |  Comments[1]