August 23rd, 2005

APAN Day Zero

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Someone left a comment asking me what’s APAN or Asia Pacific Advance Network. It is a meeting where AP network researchers get together to discussing advance networking issues and also a place where Advance Research and Education Network (AREN) (and also the GRID lately) people gather to discuss network collobration. SingAREN is the representative for Singapore in this area which is one of the reasons I am here. In fact, SingAREN is going to host APAN next year in Singapore so we have quite a big team here this time.

But like APRICOT, a lot of side meetings are also held concurrently. Just yesterday alone, I have to switch between APSTAR, IPv6 Summit and also chairing APEET and JET-Internationalized Email Address.

Incidently, for those who is interested in Internet statistics in Taiwan, you should look at the presentation Ching Chiao did at APSTAR. 14.6M Internet users, E-Commerce NTD 35b (~1b USD), 2.2M Skype, 400k blogs and 108% Mobile penetration. The last one 108% is interesting because it means many people are holding two mobile plans or more.

(Speaking of werid statistics, do you know that Japan actually has a higher broadband penetration then PC ownership? That’s a story for another day)APEET also did another ENUM/SIP Trial, giving out handsets made by Senao. But this time round, we are dealing with a much smaller numbers and given we did most of the hardwork in APRICOT, this was pretty easy. We also have our annual meeting, discussing workplan for the next coming year and with that, restructuring the charters of APEET.

The most tedious meeting I had yesterday was JET-Internationalized Email Address meeting. We had John Klensin with us this time and we had very intense technical discussion on the various architecture models. Solutions discussed include

1) ACE@ACE model like IDNA (RFC3490) as proposed by draft-lee-jet-ima

2) Only UTF8@UTF8 model as proposed draft-klensin-emailaddr-i18n but without ASCII downgrade

3) UTF8@UTF8 as proposed by draft-klensin-emailaddr-i18n with ASCII downgrade

Suffice to say, there is no perfect solution. It is all about techncial trade-off and a lot of engineering politics :-) Anyway, it is a very good discussion on the pros and cons of each and now, we need to sleep on it for a while before deciding on a path to take.

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