ITU-T e-FLASH
Telecommunication Standardization Sector
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Issue No. 34 |
February 2008 |
WTSA-08 a first for Africa |
The quadrennial event that defines the future direction
for the ITU’s Standardization Sector (ITU-T) – the World
Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) – will
take place for the first time in Africa in 2008. It will
also be the first chaired by a woman (Ms Lyndall
Shope-Mafole, Director-General of the South African
Department of Communications), and for the first time is
preceded by a
Global Standards Symposium (GSS).
WTSA-08 will be held 21 - 30 October 2008, at the
Emperors Palace, Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South
Africa.
An official ‘Circular’
letter has been issued encouraging Member States and
ITU-T Sector Members to participate in discussions on
the future structure of the Sector: the study groups
(including regional tariff groups under Study Group 3);
and the Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group
(TSAG).
WTSA-08 will also be unique in that the term limit for
chairmanships agreed at the WTSA-2000 will apply for the
first time and many of the current chairmen and
vice-chairmen will retire. Although this will mean the
loss of much experience, it does offer the opportunity
to consider a major restructuring of the Sector. Member
States and ITU-T Sector Members are therefore advised to
await the outcome of the next TSAG meeting in July, when
a new structure for the Sector should be clearer, before
submitting candidatures for chairmen or vice-chairmen.
The
Global Standards Symposium (GSS) will be held at the
same venue on 20 October 2008. It will see leading
figures in the telecom/ICT field, both from government
and the industry, give their vision of the future, and
suggest ways of increasing the involvement of developing
countries in the development and implementation of
standards (bridging
the standardization gap). Additionally the event
will examine global ICT standards challenges, such as
accessibility, climate change and collaboration among
standards development organisations (SDOs). Although not
formally a part of the WTSA-08, the GSS will provide a
report to the WTSA for information and action as
appropriate, giving participants a unique opportunity to
provide input to the event that decides the future
direction for ITU-T.
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ITU board member for ICANN |
Reinhard Scholl, Deputy to the Director of ITU’s Telecommunication
Standardization Bureau has taken a seat on the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
board.
Annually, in rotation, ETSI, ITU-T and W3C appoint one non-voting liaison (TLG,
Technical Liaison Group) to the ICANN Board. ICANN is responsible for the
global coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers. These
include domain names (like .org, .museum and country codes like .UK), as
well as the addresses used in a variety of Internet protocols.
At ICANN’s 30th International Public Meeting in Los Angeles, Internet
pioneer Vint Cerf's term as Chairman of ICANN’s Board came to an end. He was
succeeded by Peter Dengate Thrush, a New Zealand lawyer and former President
of InternetNZ.
The news follows a recent
announcement
on collaboration towards standards for the multilingual Internet made during
the Internet Governance Forum.
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ICTs and Climate Change |
ITU has issued a call for
papers/speakers for its upcoming Symposia on ICTs and Climate Change, to be held
April 15-16 2008 in Kyoto, Japan, hosted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and
Communications (MIC) and 17-18 June 2008 in London, hosted by BT.
The
events are part of a new initiative by ITU to better understand how ICTs can
help mitigate and adapt to climate change as well as monitoring its
impact.
Giving impetus to this work, a
new report from ITU-T shows how Information and communications technologies
(ICTs) contribute to global warming, but also how they can be used to monitor
climate change, to mitigate its effects, to improve energy efficiency and to
reduce carbon emissions in other sectors of the economy. The report -- ICTs and
Climate Change -- is the third in the new series of Technology
Watch Briefing Reports, launched by ITU-T in October 2007.
Since 1970, the production of greenhouse gases has risen by more than
70 per cent, and this is having a global effect in warming the planet, causing
changing weather patterns, rising sea-levels, desertification, shrinking ice
cover and other worrying long-term effects. The
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) foresees a further
rise in average global temperatures of between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees centigrade by
2030. Climate change is a concern for all of humanity and requires efforts on
the part of all sectors of society, including the ICT sector. Although ICTs
contribute only an estimated 2.5 per cent of total greenhouse gases, this share
is set to grow as usage of ICTs expands globally, growing at a faster rate than
the general economy.
ICTs are thus part of the cause of global warming,
but they can also be part of the solution, for instance through the promotion of
carbon displacement technologies. ICTs are also vital in monitoring the spread
of global warming. One specific contribution ICTs can make is through the
substitution of travel by electronic forms of communication, such as telephone
calls, email or video-conferencing, all of which benefit from ITU-T's
standardization work. In particular, high-performance video-conferencing, or telepresence (the topic of the second Technology Watch Briefing Report), can
give the impression of 'being there, without going there'. Furthermore, ITU-T
itself is also contributing to a greener future through its decision to make
ITU-T Recommendations freely available online. In the mid 1990s, more than one
million publications were printed by ITU but, with free Recommendations now
available in electronic form, this has been cut to just a few thousand that are
still printed, and carbon emissions from transport of printed copies and CD-ROMs
has been greatly reduced.
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Event brings together ICT and motor industries |
ITU will team up with ISO
and IEC for a third time in 2008 to
present the
Fully Networked
Car. The three organisations working together under the
World Standards Cooperation (WSC) banner will host the workshop and
exhibition at one of the world’s leading automotive events, the Geneva
International Motor Show.
Key for 2008 is the question: How can ICTs in vehicles help mitigate and
monitor climate change? The Honda Racing F1 Team has kindly agreed to
display, as the key feature of the exhibition, its new 2008 F1 “Earthdreams
car” to give special emphasis to the environmental theme. Experts believe
that more sophisticated traffic management and driver assistance systems can
help reduce the environmental impact caused by motoring. 2008 will see a
keynote speech from Max Mosley, president of the FIA (Fédération
Internationale de l’Automobile), organizer of the Formula One World
Championship.
In general, the event, 5 - 7 March, will focus on information and
communication technologies (ICT) in motor vehicles and specifically
standards that will facilitate the convergence of these industries.
ICT in vehicles represents a significant value-add for consumers in terms of
safety, comfort and mobility. Predictions for the size of the market run
into billions of dollars and stakeholders agree that standardization is key
to the development of new technologies and that coordination between the
traditionally remote vehicle manufacturing and ICT industries is crucial.
The Fully Networked Car brings together experts ranging from top
decision-makers to engineers, designers, planners, government officials,
regulators, standards experts and analysts. The workshop
programme
features speakers from some of the biggest names in the ICT and automobile
industries. The panel of high-level global experts that will frame the major
issues and engage the audience in discussion on this important topic come
from companies including: BMW, Connexis, Fiat, Ford, Freescale
Semiconductor, Honda, Intel, Motorola, Oracle, Telefonica, Telcordia,
Toyota-InfoTechnology Center, T-Systems, Volvo and Wavecom.
Among other topics to be discussed are the radio spectrum used for
car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communications; the convergence of
telematics and infotainment and systems and standards related to safety.
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Common alerting protocol becomes ITU-T Recommendation |
A standard that allows a warning message to be consistently disseminated
simultaneously over different systems and applications has been approved as
an ITU-T Recommendation.
The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) v.1.1 developed by OASIS was the basis
for the text that will be published as an ITU-T Recommendation following
approval on 12 September. Publication as an ITU-T Recommendation (X.1303)
will help ensure that CAP is deployed worldwide giving technical
compatibility for users across all countries. The goal of public warning is
to reduce the damage and loss of life caused by a natural or man-made hazard
event.
CAP is a simple, lightweight XML-based schema that provides a
general-purpose format for the exchange of emergency alerts for safety,
security, fire, health, earthquake and other events over any network. CAP
associates emergency event data (such as public warning statements,
photographs, sensor data or URIs) with basic metadata such as time, source
and level of urgency, and with geographic locations. The original V.1.1
specification was enlarged by a binary ASN.1 specification of the CAP
messages that will enable the transport of CAP messages to VoIP terminals
using H.323 among other systems. Experts say the use of ASN.1 significantly
reduces the size of the message and therefore the potential for network
congestion. OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee has also adopted
the same extension.
CAP is successfully in use by a number of public emergency services and land
management agencies today, and works with a wide variety of devices and
messaging methods.
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First
global set of standards for IPTV |
In December 2007 ITU announced the first set of global standards for
Internet Protocol TV (IPTV). The standards were built with technical
contributions from leading service providers and manufacturers from the
information and communication technology (ICT) sector and cement ITU’s role
as the global leader in IPTV standards development.IPTV is one of the
most highly visible services to emerge as part of the development of
next-generation networks (NGN). Indeed, it is seen as both the business case
and principal driver for accelerating deployment of NGN.
The new standards were developed by the Focus Group on IPTV (FG IPTV) in
ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T).
Malcolm Johnson, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization
Bureau said, "Standards are crucial for IPTV to reach its market potential
and global audience. They are necessary in order to give service providers —
whether traditional broadcasters, ISPs, cable operators or telecoms service
providers — control over their platforms and their offerings. Standards here
will encourage innovation, help mask the complexity of services, guarantee
quality of service, ensure interoperability and, ultimately, help players
remain competitive."
This announcement follows the seventh and final meeting of FG IPTV hosted
in Malta by the Maltese Ministry for Competitiveness and Communications.
Censu Galea, Minister for Competitiveness and Communications said, "The
stage of work that sees completion this week lays the groundwork for an area
of ICT that some predict could attract up to 100 million subscribers in the
next three years. It’s easy to see why so many of the world’s key ICT
companies have been keen to progress this work in ITU. Malta is proud to
host this event and play a part in advancing this important technology."
Contained within the documents produced by the Focus Group are the
high-level architecture and frameworks needed by service providers in order
to rollout IPTV services. ITU’s next phase of IPTV work — IPTV-GSI (global
standards initiative) — will centre on the speedy preparation of standards
based on documents produced by FG IPTV as well as on the detailed protocols
required.
The 2006−2007 period has seen numerous physical and electronic meetings
and workshops progressing work on IPTV around the world. Twenty-one
documents covering IPTV requirements, architecture, quality of service (QoS),
security, digital rights management (DRM), unicast and multicast, protocols,
metadata, middleware and home networks will be submitted to the ITU-T Study
Group charged with progressing and distributing the work. The IPTV-GSI will
build on the momentum generated over the past 20 months, and it is foreseen
that contributions and participation will continue to increase.
Operators consider IPTV a key element of a triple-play package of voice,
video and data services. Standardization is imperative if service providers
are to offer high quality products with value-additions, such as
video-on-demand services that will inevitably drive the market. A
combination of voice, Internet and video services over a single broadband
link and from a single provider is foreseen as the ultimate goal of the
broadband revolution.
FG IPTV benefited from collaboration with all ITU-T Study Groups and
other forums and regional standards bodies, including ATIS IPTV
Interoperability Forum (IIF), DSL Forum, the DVB project, ETSI TISPAN and
the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI).
See also
IPTV and HDTV advances.
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Standard to inform next of kin in emergency |
A standardized way to identify next-of-kin (or other
emergency contact) in a mobile handsets’ directory, for use in case of
emergency, has been sent for next level approval by Study Group 2 in May
2008.Currently emergency service workers searching for contact information
for the next-of-kin to an injured person have no commonly understood way of
identifying that person’s details. Increasingly the directory of the injured
person’s mobile handset is used, since it usually contains the names and
numbers of next-of-kin. However, there is no standard way to distinguish
these contacts from all other entries in the mobile handset directory.
A prefix to those contacts to be dialed in case of emergency is one
solution. International standards must be useable by anyone, regardless of
language or script. This requirement has been met by using Arabic numerals
(the digits 0 through 9) since they are known by all users around the world.
The owner of a mobile handset can indicate contacts to be dialled in case of
emergency by formatting the name in the form “0nx”, where “n” is a digit
from 1 through 9 and “x” is any meaningful descriptive character string
(e.g. “Anna” or “spouse” or “安娜”). In the interface it would be displayed as
“01Anna” or “01spouse” or “01安娜”. This descriptive string is used for the
“contact name” in the mobile handset directory; the actual number of the
person to call in case of emergency is used for the corresponding “contact
number”.
Once this standard is approved and widely implemented by individual mobile
users around the world, any emergency service worker can look at the mobile
handset directory and quickly identify entries tagged by the user as contact
persons to call in case of emergencies.“
Emergency contact number notation” stands on the runway to take off as a new
clause in ITU-T Recommendation E.123, which currently specifies, among other
things, the familiar +41 22 123 456 notation for telephone numbers and other information commonly displayed
on business cards.
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Being there without going there with telepresence |
Do you remember your last video conference? Blurry faces on tiny screens,
with sound that doesn’t quite synchronize with the stilted movement of the
lips. After the laborious setup of cameras and microphones, you seem to
spend more time worrying about technical problems than talking about the
topic at hand, with repeated loss of connection. As frustration grows, and
attention wanders, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that you should have
arranged a face-to-face meeting instead.
A new set of technologies – referred to as Telepresence – will give users
the illusion of sitting on the opposite side of the remote party’s
conference table. High-definition (HD) video images and audio are
transmitted via packed-based
Next-Generation Networks (NGN), connecting conference rooms around the
world, and covering distances of thousands of miles with zero latency. While
the network infrastructure remains transparent to the user, vendors equip
conference rooms with high-end displays, cameras, loudspeakers and furniture
to enhance the conferencing experience. Telepresence-systems are already
available on the market, and involved companies go as far as identifying the
technology as a potential billion dollar market, for solution vendors as
well as for network service providers (NSP).
A new ITU-T Briefing Report on Telepresence
has been released as part of the Technology Watch function, which evaluates
the market potential and different fields of application of Telepresence
solutions in both, developed and developing countries. The report notes the
standardization work currently going on in ITU, including the consideration
of migrating currently used multimedia protocols, such as
H.323 and
SIP into a
new generation of multimedia protocols, called
H.325
or Advanced Multimedia Systems (AMS), that takes into consideration special
aspects of security, flexibility, QoS, and support for mobile devices. This
report is the second of a new series of Technology Watch Briefing Reports
looking at emerging new technologies.
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DSL and PON: energy saving techniques |
In the context of ITU-T's efforts to address climate change issues,
Study Group 15
will hold three
tutorials
on energy saving techniques during its February meeting.
A checklist for developers of standards is already under development in SG
15. The technologies considered in the list include optical transport
networks and access network transport technologies such as digital
subscriber line (DSL) and Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Networks (GPON).
Together these technologies represent a significant consumption of energy
worldwide. The idea is that the checklist is applied before the work
commences, during the work and after the completion of the work. The use of
the checklist should ideally be complemented by involving energy efficiency
experts and users in the process.
The tutorials to be held 13, 14 and 15 February will look at the checklist
as well as topics such as energy efficient Ethernet and opportunities and
techniques for power saving in DSL and PON. A general introduction to the
issues surrounding ICTs and climate change, (to be addressed in two upcoming
ITU Symposia on ICTs and Climate Change
), and an update on the outcome of the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, December 2007, will be included.
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