We were extremely excited to announce last week the two very first ground system products to be recognized as DIFI standard compliant.
This is a major milestone for DIFI that will bring confidence to ground system operators that they can rely upon a given product from a given vendor to meet or exceed functional interoperability expectations matching the standard.
Sometimes standards efforts get undermined because vendors will meet the heart of a standard but make adjustments to the “standard standard” for proprietary benefit but compromising interoperability. To a degree that happened in our own industry with VITA 49 and DVB-S2X over the years. One of our first tasks in moving forward with the DIFI standard was to anchor around a single, stable, accepted form of VITA 49 to build upon.
The first two compliant products, one from Keysight and one from Kratos, went through a manual version of the first type for our projected common process that will stipulate to “types” of compliance. The first type—silver—is based on self-testing, the second phase—gold—will involve third party validation. We are still defining and enabling the gold process, addressing elements such as approved certifiers, cost structures, etc.
Because the first two products were our “test case” milestone, we used a manual process with members of the DIFI Compliance Working Group validating the self-testing results. We’ll use the same manual model for the next six products that are already in the queue for verification. Ultimately, vendors will be able to choose between the silver and gold types that best meet their customers’ requirements.
I want to give a shout out to the members of the DIFI Certification Working Group, including group chairman Kieth King of Gilat Wavestream, for the hard work and careful thought they have put into developing the process, the important milestone they’ve reached and the continuing effort to evolve processes that advance market confidence and meet market needs.
