[ipv6-wg] Report from ITU Study Group 20 meeting 3-13 December 2018 in Wuxi, China

Dear colleagues,

The meeting of ITU Study Group 20 in Wuxi, China, just finished and I’d like to give you a brief report on the discussions of the work on a draft Recommendation on IPv6 addressing.

This meeting was the group's first face-to-face meeting since our discussion of the draft Recommendation at RIPE 77 in May 2018 and the July 2018 draft review deadline.  The RIPE community's comments were brought to the meeting as a Liaison Statement. 

Several other parties also submitted their own Contributions, including the RIPE NCC in its role as an ITU Sector Member. The proposal in our Contribution, with reference to earlier discussions and your review, was to discontinue this particular Work Item. The United States Government and ARIN made Contributions along similar lines, seeking to stop the work developing this particular Recommendation. This position was also supported by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and several sector members.

I’d like to highlight that both in their Contribution and interventions, the US expressed their gratitude to the RIPE community for their extensive review and feedback on the draft Recommendation.

The main author of the draft submitted a Contribution with their account of our discussions at RIPE 77 and the review process, as well as a joint Contribution with the Beijing University for Post and Telecommunications providing a case study of an IPv6 address plan. 

Having taken all of these contributions and interventions into consideration, the focus of the meeting discussion was on whether or not the work should continue. Unfortunately, the RIPE community’s feedback was only taken into consideration as a high-level conclusion that the current text does not meet the technical standards expected, and the actual text of the draft was not reviewed or revised during this meeting.

Unable to reach consensus, the question of whether the work should continue was deferred upwards to the meeting of the Working Party and finally to the closing plenary. 

During the closing plenary, the Chairman of Study Group 20 proposed continuing the work for at least one more meeting on the premise that the draft’s main author would come back with a Contribution addressing the concerns raised with the current draft. He emphasised that the work item would be dropped unless there were contributions and agreement to advance the text at the next meeting. 

The RIPE NCC accepted the Chairman’s proposal as a constructive way forward. We look forward to the contributions at the next meeting with the expectation that they will address the concerns raised during your review.

We would like to thank you again for the constructive comments raised during the review process. We would also like thank the Question’s rapporteur, associate rapporteur and the Study Group’s management team for all their time and assistance, and of course all the member states and sector members that participated in this discussion.

The next meeting of Study Group 20 is scheduled to take place in mid-April, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Regards,

Marco Hogewoning
RIPE NCC