It’s probably true that you don’t want to watch your sausages being made, but when an industry develops its technical standards the “making” process can be both important and enlightening. For example, DIFI’s working group that is defining a certification process for satellite ground equipment is engaged in a compelling discussion about exactly what should be certified. (Well, compelling for an engineer like me anyway.)

The question is, should the standard be limited to specifying the form and format of digital IF packets so that they are readable by all standard devices regardless of what the packets contain? Or should certification go further, defining processes that verify whether the packets “make sense” as signal data to other devices in the network?

It’s something that comes up in most standards development discussions. For example, generic IP packets have no performance standards. Garbage in, garbage out. But readable garbage, even if not useable. DVB-S2/x does not have performance tiers, but it does specify spectral efficiency requirements.

With 3GPP, there are essentially no performance tiers dictated for 3G and 4G, but 5G has them for certain use cases, such as Low-Latency Communications (LLC) and Enhanced Mobile Broadband (EMB).

That’s one of the reasons why this debate in the DIFI Certification Working Group is more than simply sausage-making. It will affect how we do business. Increasingly, satellite networks must interoperate with other networks and other standards, including 5G. How will our specialized devices fit? And if a device is certified as DIFI compliant, what should customers expect?

There are good arguments on both sides of the debate. I won’t go into them here. (That would be too deep in the sausage for most folks.) But for those who are interested in contributing to this and related discussions, I invite you to become a DIFI member and participate in the working groups.

Read more from DIFI Consortium.