Please Whitelist This Site? I know everyone hates ads. But please understand that I am providing premium content for free that takes hundreds of hours of time to research and write. I don't want to go to a pay-only model like some sites, but when more and more people block ads, I end up working for free. And I have a family to support, just like you. :) If you like The TCP/IP Guide, please consider the download version. It's priced very economically and you can read all of it in a convenient format without ads. If you want to use this site for free, I'd be grateful if you could add the site to the whitelist for Adblock. To do so, just open the Adblock menu and select "Disable on tcpipguide.com". Or go to the Tools menu and select "Adblock Plus Preferences...". Then click "Add Filter..." at the bottom, and add this string: "@@||tcpipguide.com^$document". Then just click OK. Thanks for your understanding! Sincerely, Charles Kozierok Author and Publisher, The TCP/IP Guide

NOTE: Using software to mass-download the site degrades the server and is prohibited. If you want to read The TCP/IP Guide offline, please consider licensing it. Thank you.

The TCP/IP Guide  9  Networking Fundamentals

Quality of Service (QoS) 1 Proprietary, Open and De Facto Standards

You can't study networking and its related technologies without very quickly encountering a whole host of standards that are related to the subject—and organizations that create these standards. Network standards facilitate the interoperability of network technologies and are extremely important. It may be an exaggeration to say that networking wouldn't exist without standards, but it isn’t to say that networking as we know it would not exist without them. Networks are literally everywhere, and every hardware device or protocol is governed by at least one standard, and usually many.

In this section I provide a brief examination of the often-overlooked subject of network standards and standards organizations. I begin with a background discussion of why standards are important, highlighting the differences between proprietary, de facto and open standards. I give an overview of networking standards in general terms, and then describe the most important international standards organizations and industry groups related to networking. I then describe the structure of the organizations responsible for Internet standards, including the registration authorities and registries that manage resources such as addresses, domain names and protocol values. I conclude with a discussion of the Request For Comment (RFC) process used for creating Internet standards.

Quality of Service (QoS) 1 Proprietary, Open and De Facto Standards