Writer's Notebook - James Rafferty Blog

Learning about the IETF and RFCs

I've started to do a bit of blogging at work related to my job as a Voice over IP Gateway Product Manager.  My latest post may be of more general interest for people who follow developments in technology, particularly as it relates to the Internet.   The topic is on the 40th anniversary of the 1st RFC (Request for Comments), which is the term the Internet Engineering Task Force uses for the documents it publishes. 

You can read the post here. 

I have a personal connection to the IETF that goes back to 1996.  At that time, the fax community realized that the movement to IP networks was going to be big and we started discussing it among ourselves at the TR-29 fax standards committee of the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA).  There were a lot of ideas, but the energy level really lifted when Dave Crocker of the IETF visited our committee.  Dave's older brother Steve actually wrote the first RFC (the one whose anniversary we are celebrating), but Dave was also very well known as an author of several key RFCs related to Internet Mail.  

Dave invited members of the fax community to get involved in working at the IETF to figure out how to do fax over the Internet and many of us took him up on it.  In my case, I volunteered to become a co-chair of the effort and officially took that position when the Internet Fax working group was chartered a couple of months later.  

One method for encoding images in email messages is by using an image format known as TIFF.  A couple of months into the standards effort, it became clear we needed to standardize this format, which had already been in use for many years and I joined Glenn Parsons of Nortel in attempting to edit the original TIFF-F document from Steve Campbell into a form that could be published as an RFC.   Normally, chairs are encouraged NOT to get involved in writing or editing documents, and I soon learned why.  

By the next meeting, there was already an alternative group that wanted to write their own TIFF standards document and include a whole bunch of brand new material.  Needless to say, my position as both co-chair and document writer got tricky very fast.  I can remember eating barbeque in Memphis as the six people involved tried to work out a compromise.  Later at the meeting, the working group voted against the wishes of the chairs and asked us all to work together. 

If you look on Google for TIFF and RFC, you'll find that we did somehow manage to work all of this out.  The original TIFF RFCs were 2301, 2302 and 2306, and were published by the IETF in 1998.  Later on, these RFCs were updated for a variety of reasons, so there are about 7 RFCs with my name as co-author, all on the topic of TIFF for facsimile. 

There are many other stories to tell about how TIFF got standardized, but I'll leave them for another time. 

Why Faxes are still around

In the January, 2009 issue of Wired, there is an article called: Burning Question - Why are faxes still around?  Good question.  In the 1990's, I made a reasonably good living consulting with companies around the world about building, marketing and selling information about fax technology and its many offshoots with my company Human Communications.   During that time, computer based fax had a very good ten year run and the fax machine was everywhere, but the coming of the Internet threatened to change all of that.  

By the close of the decade, I was advising my clients to develop new business models that didn't depend so much upon fax.   However, at the same time, I was teaching them about the latest high speed fax (V.34 @ 33.6 kilobits / second) and about the new hot movement, Internet Fax.  

The conventional logic at the time was that the Internet was here and nobody needed fax anymore.  My view was much more complex.  I saw lots of good uses for fax as it existed, but wondered how people would communicate documents over the Internet.  

Now, it's ten years later, and fax is still alive and well.  It's not as sexy as it seemed to be in the early 90's, but fax machines are everywhere and fax servers are still very common in corporate offices, especially for receiving faxes that will be directed into email boxes.   Many corporate citizens never use fax at all, but it's a mode of communication that has fewer dependencies than email (can you read that attachment, does it contain a virus?) and reaches into the smallest office.  In my own case, it's still the preferred way to upload information to our corporate expense report system or to send on medical receipts to an insurance company.   

Fax.  It started running over telegraph wires, took all of the telephone technology developments in stride and now can run over the Internet.  It's not perfect, but it does the job of sending paper documents over phone or Internet lines very well.  So, think twice before you get rid of that fax machine or opt not to get the fax feature in your next multi-function printer.    

Fax Tracks

I've had a pretty quiet holiday celebrating with my family.    With this being a long weekend, there has also been some time to do some tidying up on My web site.   As mentioned in my last post, I have now mapped this blog to my humancomm.com domain name and, in the process, have changed the links to the blog from my home page and also kept the older version of the blog on my site as an archive.   

In the 1990's, I ran Human Communications, which was the authoritative source for information about facimile technology in the form of my newletter Human Communications Digest and eventually, the web site.    Among my most popular features were a Fax Glossary and a Fax Resources page.    Out on Google, you can still find these pages very high in their listings.    I decided it was time to bring the information up to date, so I updated most of the links where needed and added some color about changes that took place in the Internet Fax standards that we produced in the IETF Fax Working Group of the IETF.   

Fax was a really hot communications technology during the Nineties and is actually still in very widespread use.    As an example, at my company, we do our expense reports online and then fax in our receipts, thus allowing for paperless expense processing.    This kind of integration of fax with business processes is an example of the type of evolution which has kept fax relevant.    My company Cantata Technology still sells a lot of fax server technology and we are just staring to see the move toward Internet-based fax that my colleagues in the standards bodies thought would be happening about 5 years ago.   However, my belief is that the Telecom downturn slowed the evolution to Voice over IP and with it, the related move from traditional phone based fax to IP fax.  That all seems to be changing now as enterprises are making the move to Voice over IP and along with it moving to IP fax.    I recently was briefly interviewed on this topic by Rich Tehrani as covered in his blog.   

In summary, fax is still around and still selling well, albeit in a mature market.   So, if you want to learn more about it, feel free to browse through my Human Communications web site, where there is all kinds of information about how it works and what the most important standards are.    For an updated view, you can also check out the Cantata Technology web site, which has numerous documents such as white papers on how fax is being used in business today.