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Coordination on Multilingualism Necessary to Avoid Net Fragmentation
The
joint
ITU/UNESCO
Global Symposium on Promoting the Multilingual Internet
closed with the chairman encouraging the two organizations
to take a lead role in promoting international cooperation
for developing the multilingual internet and encouraging
interested relevant organizations as well as individuals
to actively join these initiatives and strengthen their
cooperation in this regard. Specifically it was said,
there is a need for increased ITU/UNESCO involvement in
the harmonization of standards, in addition to their
specific programmes to promote multilingualism and local
content throughout the digital world.
There is, it was agreed, a huge demand for the support of
multiple languages and responding to this in a more
coordinated way, experts concurred is a key way to avoid
fragmentation of the Internet.
Chair, Direk Charoenphol, National Telecommunications
Commission, NTC, Thailand: “It is fundamental that, in
the end, multilingualism – whether using IDNs, keywords
or contents – be natively supported in operating systems
and browsers, not retrofitted, to avoid the need for
plug-ins, which creates a constant source of user and
operational difficulties.”
Houlin Zhao, Director, Telecommunication Standardization
Bureau, ITU said: “By organizing this event, ITU has
demonstrated its determination to work on these issues.”
He thanked UNESCO for its support in the organization of
the event.
Elizabeth Longworth, Director, Information Society Division, UNESCO: "We should not talk about culture as a feature of communications technology - rather, the internet is a domain of human activity in its own right, where language and content are manifestations of the users' cultures and so the focus should be on the users' ability to participate, to become content providers and to navigate across linguistic
boundaries."
A roadmap or guidelines highlighting steps towards a
multilingual Internet is seen as an important initiative.
It was agreed that this is a complex task that requires
substantial and strengthened cooperation between relevant
bodies.
During the three-day Symposium, a number of presentations
were made and discussions focused on standardization
activities and technical solutions for internationalized
domain names (IDNs), for equipping non-scripted languages
and allowing them to be present on the internet, the
development and promotion of local contents, and
measurements of the current linguistic diversity on the
internet. Perspectives of domain name registries and an
overview of the associated intellectual property issues
that arise when multilingual domain names are deployed
were also presented.
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IPTV
Focus Group Announced
ITU
will take the lead in international standardization for
IPTV with the announcement that it is to form a Focus
Group on IPTV (FG IPTV).
The first meeting of the FG IPTV
will take place 10-14 July in Geneva. The official
announcement is
here,
and a new
webpage
has details on how to participate, significant
dates and news.
The announcement, while acknowledging that standards work
is ongoing in many different places, including ITU, is a
reaction to an industry call for ITU to push forward and
coordinate global standardization effort in the field.
IPTV is a system where a digital television service is
delivered to consumers using the Internet protocol over a
broadband connection. It will help pave the way for
players, many of whom are already moving to IP-based NGN
infrastructure, to offer a triple-play of video, voice and
data.
Standards are necessary in order to give service
providers, whether traditional broadcasters, ISPs or
telecoms service providers, control over their platforms
and their offerings. Standards here will encourage
innovation, help mask the complexity of services,
guarantee QoS, ensure interoperability and ultimately help
players remain competitive.
The mission of IPTV FG is to coordinate and promote the
development of global IPTV standards taking into account
the existing work of the ITU study groups as well as SDOs,
fora and consortia.
The group was launched following a decision taken at a
public consultation meeting attended by around 120 experts
from the world’s ICT companies. Attendees agreed that
all players in the IPTV value chain will benefit from
worldwide standards, that there is a lot of work to be
done and that rapid progress is necessary in order to
avoid market fragmentation. The Focus Group mechanism was
seen as the most effective way of addressing this. Inputs
to the meeting as well as a webcast can be found
here.
Houlin Zhao, Director of the Telecommunication
Standardization Bureau of ITU: “We have seen a desire to
expedite and accelerate a global focus on standards for
IPTV. There has been extraordinary consensus that ITU must
lead this work and I am pleased that – again - ITU is
seen as the right place to develop and harmonize this
international standardization work, as well as identify
and help fill gaps where there is still a standardization
need.”
Bilel Jamoussi, Director Strategic Standards, Nortel,
said: “Industry applauds ITU’s initiative to create
this Focus Group and will contribute to its success.”
The FG will build upon existing work. Its scope will
include architecture and requirements, QoS, security,
network and control aspects, end system aspects –
terminals etc., interoperability, middleware and
application platforms.
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Video Coding Work Progressed in
April Meetings
Work
in the video coding space progressed, following meetings
taking place in Geneva in April.
Also,
the beginning of the month saw the Japan launch of a new
mobile terrestrial digital audio/video broadcasting
service using H.264 and called "1seg".
The video compression standard (full name ITU-T Rec.
H.264 or MPEG-4 pt.10/ AVC) jointly developed by
ITU-T SG16
and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)
is now being deployed in products from companies including
Apple, Sony, BT, France Telecom, Intel, Motorola, Nokia,
Polycom, Samsung, Tandberg and Toshiba and in services
such as over-the-air broadcast television, the new HD DVD
and Blu Ray disc formats, and a large number of
deployments of direct-broadcast satellite-based television
services.
In
Geneva, a new Recommendation was consented that will allow
the use of a ‘back channel’ to convey the level of
loss or corruption in video messages and if necessary
apply measures to compensate for that. So, for example, at
the content delivery end, an encoder, upon determining
that a message is not getting through properly, may
decide to reduce the message to its bare essentials resulting
in a lower fidelity for the end user. Alternatively, the
encoder and decoder can deploy intelligent recovery
mechanisms. This will better support Recommendation
H.264’s use in environments that may be more susceptible
to error, for example in mobile telephony and IP-based
video conferencing.
The
new Recommendation has been drafted in such a way that it
can be applied to existing (e.g. H.262, H.263, H,264)
and future video coding standards.
The
work took place during co-located meetings of the Joint
Video Team (JVT) and ITU-T Study Group 16, home of media
coding work in the ITU. Over 90 documents were
considered by the JVT group, which is the ITU-T and ISO/IEC joint
project to enhance standard video coding performance, and is
home to H.264/AVC.
An
amendment to H.264 added support of new extended-gamut
colour spaces, which are recently-specified enhanced
methods of measuring and representing the brightness and
color of the objects in video pictures. Also, in relation
to H.264, work continued on developing new
profiles supporting its use in high-end studio
applications that use the 4:4:4 color sampling system and
on developing scalable video coding (SVC) extensions.
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Standard Offers Improved VoIP
Quality
SG16
completed work on a new scalable voice codec - G729.1 -
that will significantly improve voice quality in VoIP
calls by offering wideband quality. Wideband telephony
gives more natural sounding voice and greatly improves
intelligibility and listening comfort.
G.729.1 extends the ITU-T G.729 speech coding standard
widely used in VoIP systems and is fully interoperable
with it. It will allow smooth transition from narrow band
(300-3400 Hz) "PSTN" quality telephony to high
quality wideband (50-7000Hz) telephony over IP and
efficient deployment in existing infrastructures.
G.729.1 can operate at 12 bit rates from 32 kbit/s down to
8 kbit/s with wideband quality above 14kbit/s to
dynamically provide the optimum voice quality according to
service and network constraints: The bit rate can be
adjusted "on-the-fly" during a call by simple
truncation of the "embedded" bitstream at any
point of the communication chain such as gateways or other
devices combining multiple data streams. This highly
flexible bit rate adaptation will avoid network congestion
and the dropping of packets that severely impair the
overall quality.
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Multilingual Internet Work
Progresses
Study
Group 17 meeting in Korea, April, gave final approval to the
Question on Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) that
provides direction and focus to ongoing work.
ITU-T
was mandated to work on IDN at the 2004 World
Telecommunication Standardization Assembly in Brazil. IDN
will contribute to easier and greater use of the Internet
in those countries where the native or official languages
are not represented in ASCII characters.
Andrzej Bartosiewicz, representing Poland and acting as Rapporteur
for IDNs said: “We have received a number of
contributions in this area and have been impressed with
the level of interest and the productive nature of
discussions. There are a number of organizations working
in the field and I believe coordination will be an
important focus of any work.”
Bartosiewicz
said that a webpage will be published shortly with news on
ITU-T study in the area, as well as related events and
technical documents. An official ‘circular letter’
will be sent sent to Member States he said, requesting
information about their experiences on the use of IDN.
Given the response to this communication SG 17 will be
able to better assess the current situation and needs.
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Standard Extends Use of Legacy
Equipment for Deaf in IP Networks
A
new standard extending support of a key communications
tool for the deaf and hard of hearing to IP-based networks
was consented at a recent meeting of ITU-T’s
Study Group
16. The continued support of textphones (TTYs) as
operators increasingly shift to IP is important for the
many thousands of users of these systems.
The announcement marks a key milestone in the development
of what ITU terms Total Conversation, that is the
convergence of voice, video and text telephony.
The new standard known as ITU-T Recommendation V.151
relates to text over IP (ToIP). ToIP is the transport of
real-time text over IP networks. It differs from instant
messaging in that ToIP systems transmit bi-directionally,
one character at a time. This gives the user the feel of
real-time communication, just like voice or video systems
that transport streaming media over IP.
ToIP services are available using a legacy textphone (TTY)
which has long been the preferred tool of the deaf and
hard-of-hearing, an enabled IP phone or a PC-based client.
V.151 has an important role to play in the protection of
text quality when transported through IP networks, also
offering the potential to enable communication between
earlier incompatible textphones from different regions.
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Accessibility
Checklist for Future Standards
Study
Group 16 has
published an ‘Accessibility Checklist’ for the makers
of standards to ensure that they are taking into account
the needs of those to whom accessibility to ICTs are
restricted, the deaf or hard-of-hearing for example.
Experts say that such a list will help to ensure that
accessibility needs are taken into account at an early
stage, rather than ‘retrofitted’. The list will be
published on a new
webpage
acting as a repository for accessibility in standards
information.
Study
Group 16’s standardization work in the field of
accessibility aims to ensure that all sectors of the
global community have equal access to communications and
online information. This effort goes back to the 1990s
with V.18 (an ITU-T Recommendation on a multi-function
text telephone).
The
work takes into account the fact that users of ICTs
have a varied capability for handling information and
the controls for its presentation. The source of this
variation lies in cultural and educational backgrounds as
well as in age-related functional limitations, in
disabilities, and in other natural causes. Everyone
can benefit from this accessibility standardization work
as anyone can be permanently or temporarily disabled due
to physical, environmental (e.g. a phone call in a noisy
environment) or cultural (e.g. spoken language diversity)
conditions. Moreover, we will all grow old and lose
facilities that we take for granted now, thus enlarging
the part of the population that benefits from accessible
communication.
The most important goal of ITU-T’s accessibility
activity is to make sure that newly developed standards
contain the necessary elements to make services and
features usable for as broad a range of people as
possible. Standards describe how equipment should
interact and what quality is necessary for media to be
usable for all, additionally suitable methods of media
delivery for people with disabilities are described.
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Standards for Single Sign-On
Given Consent at ITU-T Meeting
The Security Assertion Markup
Language (SAML) and Extensible Access Control Markup
Language (XACML) authored by OASIS (Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards) have been
consented as internationally recognised ITU-T
Recommendations. The announcement is the first result of
the formal relationship between the standardization sector
of ITU and OASIS.
The standards (ITU-T Recommendations X.1141 (SAML) and
X.1142 (XACML)) address the concern of how to allow safe
single sign-on, a system that enables a user to
authenticate once and gain access to the resources of
multiple software systems. While solutions existed in this
space, all were proprietary, and therefore not addressing
the problem on a global level.
SAML and XACML are designed to control access to devices
and applications on a network. The need for standards in
this area has become more of an issue as business networks
increasingly use the public Internet.
SAML addresses authentication and provides a mechanism for
transferring authentication and authorization decisions
between cooperating entities, XACML leverages this
information to determine access to resources by focusing
on the mechanism for arriving at those authorization
decisions.
An additional feature of SAML is that it allows
organizations to communicate information without any
change to their own internal security architectures.
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