RAQMON drafts

I unfortunately cannot share the views of others with regard to the 
suitability of RAQMON for VoIP performance monitoring, and have 
expressed (and justified on technical grounds) this view repeatedly over 
the last 3-4 years.  Average packet loss rate and jitter, which are the 
only media path performance information provided, are well known to be 
grossly inadequate as a means of VoIP performance estimation. 

I understand that RAQMON includes various other metrics however media 
path performance is absolutely key and hence the absence of meaningful 
media path metrics renders RAQMON particularly unhelpful.

The industry is becoming relatively sophisticated in its understanding 
of VoIP performance - RFC3611 is now implemented in silicon and 
softphone technology, and is becoming widely available.  Within the 
industry, all the key VoIP test equipment (almost 30) vendors use 
advanced performance monitoring technology within probes and analyzers, 
measuring time varying characteristics of loss and jitter, and reporting 
MOS scores and R factors that correlate closely with user opinion, take 
into account the characteristics of codecs and PLC algorithms etc. 

Suggesting that RAQMON is a step forward in terms of VoIP performance 
monitoring represents in my opinion a step backward.  I maybe an 
idealist however I believe that standards, whether within IETF or other 
standards organizations, should have technical merit and be of general 
applicability - and I don't think RAQMON has.

Regards

Alan Clark