Death by PowerPoint is something I have experienced when attending  presentations of people who do not think in what may interest their audiences and how to convey that message but instead provide a boring compilation of bullet points that, if at all, interest themselves and none else. I bet it happened to you too.

Death by Reference Point is not such a widespread experience. Yes I am talking about 3GPP standards again. In particular how standards people create new reference points, what you and me call interfaces, that only interest themselves and no other.

As in my previous post I would suggest not to follow any of these and go agile and pragmatic. The design would probably be very different if before standard we would first try to implement something that solves a problem in a test-bed and then go for specifying.

The reference point creation obsession  may be contributing to the end of the times in which telco standards were relevant.

Let’s take the PCRF as example.

The PCRF main interfaces have been, for ages, three: Gx which is to the main Gateway, Sp to some subscriber profile repository and Rx to the IMS (relevant today only because of VoLTE).

Beyond that, 3GPP has ideated the following:

All of these are controversial but I guess that interests me and few other people (so I leave it for separate discussion).

Disclaimers:

1) yes, one of the companies I work with is CND and one of the things we do there is providing people with very flexible test-beds where they can test out their new ideas before going anywhere with them

2) yes, I am indeed listed as co-inventor of a patent on a reference point to the PCRF that never made it to 3GPP standardization.  But we did implement it before filing the patent and I did see once (years later) a US Tier1 carrier requesting such an interface in a PCRF RFP..

Picture by Christopher Bulle taken in the Tempelhofer Feld, a former airport now a park, here in Berlin. Creative Commons License.