World Information and Communications Development Trends, a presentation by Robert Shaw, head of the ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division, ITU Telecommunication Development Sector, is now available. It was presented to the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) in Hanoi, Viet Nam on 27 August 2007 discussing issues related to transition to new technologies and Next Generation Networks (NGN). For more relevant information, visit the CYB website.

The first steps towards a globally harmonized approach to identity management (IdM) have been taken during a meeting of the ITU Focus Group on Identity Management (FG IdM) bringing together, for the first time, the world’s key players in the IdM space.

IdM promises to reduce the need for multiple user names and passwords for each service used, while maintaining privacy of personal information. A global IdM solution will help diminish identity theft and fraud. Further, IdM is one of the key enablers for a simplified and secure interaction between customers and services such as e-commerce. Experts at the meeting concurred that interoperability between existing IdM solutions will provide significant benefits such as increased trust by users of on-line services as well as cybersecurity, reduction of spam and seamless "nomadic” roaming between services worldwide. Abbie Barbir, chairman of the Focus Group on Identity Management: "Our main focus is on how to achieve the common goals of the telecommunication and IdM communities. Nobody can go it alone in this space, an IdM system must have global acceptance. There was a very positive feeling at the meeting that we can achieve this and crucially we saw a great level of participation from all key players."

The meeting of the FG IdM brought together developers, software vendors, standards forums, manufacturers, telcos, solutions providers and academia from around the world to share their knowledge and coordinate their IdM efforts. Interoperability among solutions so far has been minimal. One conclusion of attendees is that cooperation is crucial and that players cannot exist in isolation.

The spirit of the meeting was that everyone will gain by providing an open mechanism that will allow different IdM solutions to communicate even as each IdM solution continues to evolve. Such a "trust metric" does not exist today experts say. Work will continue online and during Focus Group meetings in April, May, and July 2007. An analysis of what IdM is used for will be followed by a gap analysis between existing IdM frameworks now being developed by industry fora and consortiums. These gaps should be addressed before the interworking and interoperability between the various solutions can be achieved. The aim is to provide the basis for a framework which can then be conveyed to the relevant standard bodies including ITU-T Study Groups. The document will include details on the requirements for the additional functionality needed within next generation networks. ITU has a long history of innovation in this field, with key work on trusted, interoperable identity framework standards including Recommendation X.509 that today serves as the primary "public key" technical mechanism for communications security across all telecom and internet infrastructures.

See more information on the Focus Group on Identity Management (FG IdM) website.

The Clean Slate Design for the Internet is an interdisciplinary research program at Stanford University. The founders of this program believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies which must be resolved before the Internet can become a unified global communication infrastructure. They feel that to solve these deficiencies, focus must be placed on bold, unconventional, and long-term research that tries to break down the network's ossification. 

They characterize the program with two questions: (1)  Given current knowledge, if we were to start over with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure? and (2) How should the Internet look in 15 years? The program will be driven from the ground up, by research projects with the intention of creating a "loosely-coupled breeding ground for new ideas."  The program's goal is to be flexible and to create the structure and identify and focus funds to support the best research in clean slate design.  The program will also collaborate with and receive funds from approximately seven industrial partners with interests in networking services, equipment, semiconductors, and applications.

See more background information on the program here.
See the white paper describing the program structure and key areas of research here.
For a presentation describing the program, click here.

As one the series of Google TechTalks, Van Jacobson presents his talk entitled "A New Way to Look at Networking."

Jacobson's motivation for giving this talk is his feeling that in the last decade network research in the United States has been at a dead end. Despite technological advances, everything with networking is becoming more difficult. People are spread out over multiple devices, wireless barely works, and the solutions that are being presented solve the small problems but do not deal with the larger cause.  In the current situation, Jacobson feels the Internet is not a bad solution but the problem has changed. We are on the verge of a Copernican revolution. A good analogy to this situation is the one faced in the 1960s and 1970s when efforts were being made to use the telephony system to move data.

The traditional telephony system was not about calls, it was about wires. To have a successful business model, a ubiquitous wire system was necessary. Jacobson provides an explanation of the system, how it works, and the issues that arose over ownership of the network. One characteristic of the network was its unreliability. Every piece had to work all the time. Because of this the network was designed to have reliable elements instead of being reliable as a whole. 

The current issue is in order to have access to information, the device used must be connected to the Internet or the user will be cut off. This can be difficult because the device must have a topologically stable address. Also, the Internet does not like things that move or broadcast; it was not designed for this.  How the network is being used has changed. We are not longer in a conversation model. A conversation model cannot be transformed into a viable security model. Instead, Jacobson promotes a dissemination model by discussing the work that is being done with this framework including ways of transferring and storing information and their advantages.

Jacobson feels that the continued reliance on the conversation model has evolved the situation to the point where the user must now do the low level connection plumbing to get what he/she wants.  If we change our view to the dissemination model, the network does the plumbing. 

The full talk can be found here.

For the purposes of the New Initiative Programme event on The Future of Voice, held on 15-16 January 2007 in ITU Headquarters, five background papers as well as four regional studies have been developed and presented for comments. In order to access documents, please click on the links below.

Background Papers

• "Innovation Dynamics in the IP Environment" by Dr. Knud Erik Skouby and Dr. Reza Tadayoni
• "The Future of Communications in Next Generation Networks" by Dr. James Alleman and Dr. Paul Rappoport
• "Regulatory Trends: New Enabling Environment" by Dr. Aniruddha Banerjee, Dr. Gary Madden, and Joachim Tan
• "The Status of Voice over Internet Protocol Worldwide, 2006" by Phillippa Biggs
• "The Future of Voice: Consumer Issues" by Ewan Sutherland

Regional Case Studies

• "Future of Voice in Africa" by Russell Southwood
• "Communications: Government and Business Practices in the Asia Pacific Region" by Khelia Johnson and Oluwaseun Oyeyipo
• "Regulatory Challenges of Voice over IP Telephony: Analysis for Selected South and Eastern European Countries" by Anna Riedel
• "Ruling Voice over IP: Challenges for Regulators in Latin America"

Several Internet-related Decisions and Resolutions were adopted at the ITU 2006 Plenipotentiary Conference. These include:

• DECISION GT-PLEN/A (Antalya, 2006): Fourth World Telecommunication Policy Forum
• RESOLUTION 101 (Rev. Antalya, 2006): Internet Protocol-based networks
• RESOLUTION 102 (Rev. Antalya, 2006): ITU’s role with regard to international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet and the management of Internet resources, including domain names and addresses
• RESOLUTION 130 (Rev. Antalya, 2006): Strengthening the role of ITU in building confidence and security in the use of information and communication technologies
• RESOLUTION 133 (Rev. Antalya, 2006): Role of administrations of Member States in the management of internationalized (multilingual) domain names
• RESOLUTION GT-PLEN/7 (Antalya, 2006): Study on the participation of all relevant stakeholders in the activities of the Union related to the World Summit on the Information Society

The text of these resolutions and decisions can be found here.

One of the Intenet's pioneers, Dr. Larry Roberts, gave a presentation yesterday at ITU World Telecom Forum 2006 in Hong Kong entitled Optimizing the Internet Quality of Service and Economics for the Digital Generation. Dr. Roberts discussed standardization work in the ITU on end-to-end QoS signalling to better deliver video over the Internet. In particular, he discussed the work on a new flow based, in-band signaling standard called Y.flowreq.

The UK Office of Communications (Ofcom) has launched its new book "Communications - The Next Decade". It consists of a series of essays by academics, politicians and regulators that examine the effect of convergence on the communications sector and the authors come to some provocative conclusions.

The book is available for download as a pdf either in sections or in its entirety from the Ofcom website.

A new tool that gives a unique overview of ITU-T’s Next Generation Network (NGN) related activities has been released. The NGN Project Management Tool, was developed with the support of a voluntary contribution for one of the ITU-T Sector Members.

Since the work towards standards for NGN is taking place across a number of different ITU-T study groups and other standards development organizations (SDOs) the ability to coordinate and view all NGN work in one place will be invaluable to the swift and efficient publication of NGN specifications.

Essentially a repository of information from ITU and other SDOs, the system was asked for by members of the various Study Groups working on NGN. Key will be the ability to keep track of the latest versions of Recommendations and provide detailed information for experts and summaries for management.

Access information on the NGN Project Management Tool here.

ITU-T will host this year's Broadband Europe Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, 11-14 December 2006. BBEurope is an annual event which was initiated by the European Commission Framework Programme 6 BREAD project which is part of the "BroadBand for All"-strategic objective of the European Commission.

Peter Van Daele, BREAD Project Leader: "The concept of 'Broadband For All' refers to a situation in which broadband is not only available to every citizen, but is actually used by all of them. In that respect it is a more demanding concept than the traditional universal service obligation in telephony, which merely stipulates the availability, at certain conditions, of a given service. The usage of information and communication technologies via broadband infrastructures by all citizens is a policy objective because it is considered to be a key component of transforming Europe into a knowledge-based society, thus enhancing economic growth and increasing employment."

The BREAD project has amongst its objectives to develop a holistic vision encompassing technical, as well as economical and regulatory aspects. Another important aspect is of identifying roadblocks on European, national/regional level and share visions and best practices on national level to EU level.

BBEurope brings together on an international level all the BroadBand players, researchers, service providers, content providers, operators, manufacturers, policy makers, standardisation bodies, professional organisations. The meeting will discuss topics such as NGN, IPTV, wireless access, powerline, security, QoS, and broadband in rural areas. The event will conclude with a panel discussion titled: Future Perspectives in Broadband.

For a draft meeting agenda and more information on the call for papers (deadline: 10 November 2006), see the event website.

The 13th European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations' (CEPT) Conference, took place in Berlin 11-12 October 2006. The title of the conference was "Regulations under Challenge".

The first day, "Policy challenges", featured visionary keynote speeches by top level speakers, followed by plenary sessions presenting views from industry, the European Commission, regulators and others. Speakers included: Yoshio Utsumi (ITU), Guido Landheer (CEPT), Fabio Colasanti (EC), Michael Bartholomew (ETNO), Kevin Power (ECTA), Tom Lindström (EICTA), Sergio Antocicco (INTUG), Peter Scott (EC), Kip Meek (ERG and OFCOM), Mathias Kurth (RSPG), Rainer Münch (ETSI TISPAN), Kenneth Neil Cukier (The Economist) and Chris Marsden (RAND).

The second day, "Regulatory practices under challenge", addressed more specific topics in two parallel tracks. An overview of the state of the art in VoIP from a regulator's and incumbent's viewpoint was given in sessions on Digital Dividend, Spectrum Management Reform, New Technologies and Suitable Regulation, Building Blocks of NGN, NGN Challenges, and the Future of Telecommunications.

The meeting programme and the presentations can be found here.

This information was accessed through Richard's Blog for VoIP and ENUM

The Economist has an article entitled Your television is ringing that discusses service providers build-outs of Next Generation Network (NGN) converged platforms.

In fact, although the industry likes to depict convergence as a great boon for customers, it actually involves a technological shift that, in the first instance at least, will primarily benefit network operators. At its heart, convergence is the result of the telecoms industry's embrace of internet technology, which provides a cheaper, more efficient way to move data around on networks. On the internet everything travels in the form of “packets” of data, encoded using internet protocol, or IP. The same system can also be used to encode phone conversations, text and photo messages, video calls and television channels—and indeed anything else.

The OECD's Information, Computer and Communications Policy Committee (ICCP) organised a one-day international Forum on "Next Generation Networks: Evolution and Policy Considerations", which was held on Tuesday, 3 October 2006 in Budapest, Hungary.

For more information about the event see the OECD website.

ITU-T is hosting a workshop NGN and Grids in collaboration with the Open Grid Forum (OGF) in Geneva , 23-24 October 2006. Grid computing enables organizations to pool IT resources across departmental and organizational boundaries in a secure, highly efficient manner in order to solve massive computational problems.

Next generation networks (NGN) offer increased quality and service features for users, independent of the underlying transport technology. ITU-T’s Global Standards Initiative on Next Generation Network (NGN-GSI) is well under way and is responding to urgent market needs for global NGN standards.

The workshop will explore how Grids will work in an NGN environment by bringing together experts from both communities.
The telco community is eyeing Grid development with interest. Telcos could use grids internally, for billing and simulations for example but new revenue streams can be foreseen in areas such as managed grid services.

One panel discussion and Q&A will pose the question: "What can Grids do for Telcos and what can Telcos do for Grids?" Other panel discussions will examine NGN management and security. From a telecoms perspective there are some challenges such as QoS, how to control the network, how to manage dynamic provisioning and how to provide collision-free addresses (IPv4 <-> NAT). It is expected that all of these topics and more will be addressed. A key result of the event will be a gap analysis of standards in the field and a better understanding of how grids can be catered for in ITU-T’s NGN Release 2. An action plan outlining what work needs to be done, and where can then be developed.

See the ITU-T Newslog for more details on the workshop.

ITU-T Study Groups meeting under the auspices of the NGN Global Standards Initiative (NGN-GSI) in July 2006, finalized a substantial body of work. Sixteen new standards went into the final stages of the ITU approval process in areas including requirements, architecture, QoS and security. Around 650 documents were considered by the lead Study Group on NGN, Study Group 13, alone. Study Group management reported high levels of participation and good progress.

Two rather fundamental documents describing requirements for NGN and describing the functional architecture of the NGN will be published as ITU-T Recommendations after formal approval. Also, QoS, a crucial element as networks move to an environment inherently more susceptible to delay, interference etc. was a key focus. One new Recommendation was consented in this field.

Experts also point to the importance of a Recommendation (ITU-T Rec. Y.2021) describing how the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) as specified by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) can be used in the NGN context. A Recommendation from Study Group 19 on mobility management was also highlighted.

See the NGN Global Standards Initiative (NGN-GSI) website for further details.

In the latest issue of Total Telecom, an article entitled No Signal discusses the need to develop an NGN global interconnection regime.

"NTTs CEO and CTO have raised the alarm and are calling for the worlds operators to start work on new interconnection models today, before NGNs are in place, and more importantly before legacy networks are switched off.

At a CEO summit hosted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva in July, NTTs president and CEO, Norio Wada, called for a new interconnect framework that will extend national NGNs into a secure and fully managed global IP network."

Within the framework of the 17th European Regional ITS Conference, session on the Next Generation Infrastructure (see programme)C.B. Blankart, G. Knieps, and P. Zenhäusern presented their new paper on "Regulation of New Markets in Telecommunications? Market Dynamics and Shrinking Monopolistic Bottlenecks".

In the paper the Authors focuse on the debate on the EU telecommunications regulatory framework and analyse whether new markets create new monopolistic bottlenecks or extend the borderlines of existing bottlenecks. Three kinds of transmission qualities on service markets can be dif-ferentiated according to the products provided: narrowband services like PSTN/ISDN or GSM, semi high-speed broadband services like broadband inter-net access up to 6 Mbps download and VDSL services up to 50 Mbps. As long as, due to the absence of alternative network infrastructures, a monopolistic bot-tleneck in local infrastructure networks exists the question arises what the re-maining bottleneck components are for these different markets. In this paper we will demonstrate the shrinking-bottleneck hypothesis.

Download the full version of the paper.

ITU-T’s work on IPTV took a significant step forward following a meeting held at ITU Headquarters in in Geneva, Switzerland, 10-14 July 2006.

IPTV is being explored by media companies and service providers around the world as a way to add value to their existing offerings, and globally accepted standards are seen as essential in order that – for example – a broadcaster in one part of the world can easily distribute content in another. The meeting of the IPTV Focus Group (FG IPTV) attracted over 150 delegates from the world’s key ICT companies, over 100 input documents were considered, and the first drafts of various output documents agreed. All documents can be viewed on the group’s webpage.

A key output document drafted at the meeting shows the requirements for standardization in IPTV. Establishing this list is an essential part of the standards making process. Also dealt with by the group, and equally as important is outlining what standards already exist. The meeting among other things approved the establishment of six working groups.

Read more about the IPTV Focus Group (FG IPTV) meeting output documents through the ITU-T blog channel for IPTV. 

A presentation entitled Networks in Transition: Emerging Policy and Regulatory Challenges of Next Generation Networks (PDF) was made by Robert Shaw, Deputy Head, ITU Strategy and Policy Unit, at the Masters of Communication Management (MCM) Annual Conference, Goodenough College on 6 July 2006 in London, England.