Some interesting comments by a poster on the NANOG thread concerning a proposed NFPA fire standard for service provider facilities. What do you think?
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The folks at NFPA are at it again. They've developed NFPA 76, Standard for the protection of telecommunication facilities.
Which would be fine, the telephone companies can go off and do their own thing. The problem is the document scope expands beyond just telephone central offices.
"Standard proves minimum requirements for fire protection of telecommunication facilities, where telephone, data, cellular, internet, and video services are rendered."
See that word "Internet." While they may have intended to only apply it to the traditional telephone Central Office, the scope statement is far too broad for this standard.
You can tell the document was written by a bunch of old-line telephone folks. They make distinctions between ILECs ("These companies, who have been in business for many years,") and CLECs ("The companies are primarily start-up companies"). Such distinctions have no place in an consensus standard document. Industry standards should apply equally to all companies within an industry.
But perhaps the more distubing part of NFPA 76 is it incorporates by refence non-industry consensus based standards such as NEBS. NEBS is a proprietary standard published by Telcordia, originally developed as a private standard by AT&T. It is even more inappropriate to apply a standard such as NEBS to other industries such as the Internet, and claim it is an "industry standard."
nfpa.org
How many ISPs would like the fire marshall to apply this standard as written to their Internet facilities. If you don't comment, they just might. Oh, by the way, the deadline for comments is July 30, 2000. |
