Appendix F. Reference

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

—Admiral Grace Hopper or Andrew Tannenbaum?^[36]

Any work offering complete coverage of telecommunications standards is likely to be extremely boring. This book has attempted to show how standards are used in common practice without an unnecessary plodding focus on the low-level details. There may be times, however, when network engineers need to sit down with the specification and fully understand it. For that reason, this appendix lists the standards you might encounter when working with T-carrier systems and the common link layers.

Standards Bodies

Several bodies have worked on the standardization efforts for the technologies described in this book:

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), primarily through Committee T1
The International Telecommunications Union—Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T)
The Frame Relay Forum (FRF)
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore)

Each of these bodies produces standardization documents, but differences in philosophy and organization lead to differences in the way standards may be obtained.