The European Patent Office explains why its relationship with standards makers is so crucial in a new post on the ITU blog.

The ITU-T L.1410 and L.1420 Recommendations to assess the environmental impacts of ICTs are among 10 international methodologies to have been pilot-tested in Europe’s bid to establish and converge around a common international framework to assess the energy and emission footprint of the ICT sector.

Recommendation ITU-T L.1410 “Methodology for environmental impacts of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) goods, networks and services” provides a standardized way to assess the direct environmental impact of ICT goods, networks and services, as well as their indirect impact on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of non-ICT industry sectors. It is based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology standardized in ISO 14040 and ISO 14044.

ITU-T L. 1420 “Methodology for energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions impact assessment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in organizations” standardizes the requirements with which an organization should comply when assessing energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It is based on ISO 14064-1.

In a study led by the European Commission, 27 leading ICT companies and associations engaged in a 10-month trial of measurement methodologies developed by entities including international standards development organizations (SDOs) such as ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), ISO, IEC, ETSI and the GHG Protocol.

The study was commissioned by the European Commission’s DG CONNECT as part of its ICT Footprint initiative which aims to test the workability and compatibility of ‘footprinting’ methodologies in the ICT sector, with the overarching goal of building consensus and engendering convergence around a “common methodological framework for the measurement of the energy consumption and carbon emissions arising from the production, transport and selling processes of ICT goods, networks and services.”

The results of the study are detailed in a report titled “ICT Footprint: Pilot testing on methodologies for energy consumption and caron footprint of the ICT-sector”.

The pilots recognized Recommendation ITU-T L.1420 as the only available international reporting methodology to assess ICT-related energy consumption and/or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in ICT organizations as well as ICT-related activities within non-ICT organizations.

As regards products, networks and services, similarities were found between Recommendation ITU-T L.1410 and ETSI TS 103 199 "Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of ICT equipment, networks and services: General methodology and common requirements with the goal to develop a common ITU-T/ETSI Methodology for ICT products, networks and services".

The report concludes by recommending actions through which policy makers, SDOs and industry can accelerate the drive towards a common international ICT-footprinting framework. The pilot-testing has proven that the work performed by ITU-T is resulting in robust deliverables and should be leveraged as a basis for future enhancements.

Acting on suggestions from the pilot-testing report, ITU-T Study Group 5 (Environment and climate change) and the ETSI Technical Committee on Environmental Engineering (ETSI TC EE) are collaborating on the revision of their respective standards, Recommendation ITU-T L. 1410 and ETSI TS 103 199.

A first meeting between the two expert groups will discuss a roadmap for this collaboration. Kindly hosted by ETSI, the meeting will be held in Sophia Antipolis, France, 27-31 May 2013. Details can be found here.

Read more on ITU-T Study Group 5 here

Read more on ITU-T and climate change here

An ITU workshop on software-defined networking (SDN) will gather a global selection of standardization experts to progress SDN standards-development with one aim to establish efficient coordination  of future work.

SDN is a promising route towards the introduction and realization of network virtualization, a major shift in networking technology which will give network operators the ability to establish and manage new virtualized resources and networks without deploying new hardware technologies. ICT market players see SDN and network virtualization as critical to countering the increases in network complexity, management and operational costs traditionally associated with the introduction of new services or technologies.

SDN proposes to decouple the control and data planes by way of a centralized, programmable control-plane and data-plane abstraction. This abstraction will usher in greater speed and flexibility in routing instructions and the security and energy management of network equipment such as routers and switches.

The upcoming workshop responds to Resolution 77 - Standardization work in ITU-T for software defined networking agreed by the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-12) in Dubai, UAE, 20-29 November 2012. SDN was emphasized as a strategic priority for ITU-T by the meeting of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Group, 18 November 2012 (The 2012 CTO Meeting Communiqué can be found here). The Global Standards Symposium (GSS-12) held the day preceding WTSA-12, 19 November 2012, acted on the recommendations of the CTO Group by taking SDN as one of its points of focus and feeding the conclusions of its SDN discussion into WTSA-12.

The workshop will take place at ITU Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, 4 June 2013, within the annual meeting of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group (TSAG), 4-7 June 2013. It will be co-chaired by Wei Feng, Huawei, China, Chairman of ITU-T Study Group 11 (Signalling requirements, protocols and test specifications); and Chae-Sub Lee, Kaist, Republic of Korea, Chairman of ITU-T Study Group 13 (Future networks including cloud computing, mobile and NGN). Confirmed speakers include representatives of ITU-T Study Groups 11 and 13; the University of Tokyo, Japan; MIIT/CATR, China; Cisco Systems; the ETSI Industry Specification Group on Network Function Virtualization (ISG NFV); and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF).

More information on the workshop can be found here.

Cooperation between ITU and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has produced a new metadata standard to enable rights information interoperability in IPTV services. The standard provides a framework for communicating data such as that accompanying material under copyright, to ensure that multimedia content can be shared legally across different platforms.

Recommendation ITU-T H.751 “Metadata for rights information interoperability in IPTV services” is technically aligned with IEC 62698 “Multimedia home server systems – Rights information interoperability for IPTV”. The parallel standard is the product of collaboration  between experts from IEC Technical Committee 100 (Audio, video and multimedia systems and equipment) and ITU-T Study Group 16 (Multimedia coding, systems and applications).

“Metadata” refers to data describing aspects of other data, or information about information presented in the form of “structured, encoded data that describe characteristics of information-bearing entities to aid in the identification, discovery, assessment and management of the described entities” (Recommendation ITU-T Y.1901).

IPTV metadata is information on multimedia services and content which provides a descriptive and structural framework for managing IPTV services spanning television, audio, video, text, graphics and data. “Rights information metadata” in particular refers to information on the rights granted to end-users of multimedia content, stipulating pre-defined ‘utilization functions’  including permissions to view/hear, copy, modify, record, excerpt, sample, store or distribute content; restrictions on times or hours content can be played, viewed or heard; and obligations such as payment.

To date, a lack of interoperability in rights information metadata has meant that consumers are at risk of being locked into solutions offered by a single service provider. A user’s purchased rights to multimedia content are dependent on and bound to the rights held by the service provider. In addition, service providers employ different technologies and systems in the management of digital content and associated rights information.

ITU-T H.751 | IEC 62698 provides clear mechanisms or rules for flexible digital distribution that allows for simple exchanges of content, enabling service providers to implement common interpretation and integration of rights information. The standard targets interoperability to ensure that service providers and device manufacturers can easily exchange rights information across their current content management systems. It gives the high-level specification of the metadata for rights information interoperability (RII), defining the common semantics and core elements on RII. In other words, it finds the greatest common denominators in rights expressions (syntactic embodiments of rights) to encourage the mutual use of rights information.

The standard also specifies rights-related information – such as ‘content ID’, ‘permission issuer ID’ and ‘permission receiver ID’ – used to bridge between rights-related metadata. The rights information covered by ITU-T H.751 | IEC 62698 includes rights- and security-related metadata described in Recommendation ITU T H.750 High-level specification of metadata for IPTV services.

ITU announced the winners of its ICT Innovation Application Challenge during the 2013 WSIS Forum on 15 May. The challenge is part of ITU’s efforts to tap the power and interoperability of ICTs in promoting sustainable prosperity and business in emerging economies. The winner of the $5000 prize for the best app from an individual was MMSSign from Prof Mohamed Jemni, University of Tunis. The corporate app category was awarded to Senmobile Ltd for the application Defarlou which is a mobile order management system for entrepreneurs. Prizes for the application challenge were sponsored by Nokia Siemens Networks.

Making mobile phones accessible is still a challenge particularly in developing countries. Videophones are the preferred method of communicating for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, but, they require significant bandwidth and computer processing power to compress and decompress video in real time. The MMSign application converts text messages to a video sequence in sign language. The animations are avatar-based animation obtained by automatic interpretation of text into sign language.

SenMobile Ltd is a technology startup that specializes in innovative mobile solutions targeting the general population. Défarlou is a simple and compact ordering management application designed for entrepreneurs in developing countries. It can record orders and due dates, search for a specific order, keep track of order status and client payments, and send an SMS directly to the client when the order is ready to be delivered or picked-up. Originally designed with business owners of emerging markets in mind and developed in Senegal, défarlou means “order” in Wolof. The app is developed in Java ME and works on Java ME feature phones and smartphones.

More information on the apps can be found here.

ITU members have affirmed their commitment to the responsible consideration of health effects associated with the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) that underpin wireless communications. ITU’s standards-making arm (ITU-T) has long been engaged with the subject of human exposure to ICT-emitted EMFs and an ITU workshop in Turin, Italy, 9 May 2013, has concluded with a Call to Action giving further impetus to this work.

Man-made sources of electromagnetic fields include those generated by ionizing radiation and the electricity provided by the power sockets in our homes. ICTs such as mobile phones and wireless routers emit higher-frequency electromagnetic radiation to transmit information through the air.

The ITU Workshop on human exposure to electromagnetic fields was organized in partnership with the Ministry for Economic Development of Italy , supported by Huawei and hosted by Telecom Italia at its innovation laboratories in Turin.

The Call to Action encourages ITU-T Study Group 5 (Environment and climate change) to lead cooperation among standards development organizations (SDOs) in the interests of harmonized international EMF standards. In particular it calls on ITU-T to extend its work on human exposure to EMFs by developing and promoting EMF information and education resources accessible to all communities; establishing specialised EMF assessment and accreditation training programs for developing countries; and promoting open online compliance and reporting systems as well as the development of a standardized online system to demonstrate compliance with international EMF standards. Read the full text of the Call to Action here.

The workshop offered policy makers an overview of EMF and also sought to identify further actions through which to respond to WTSA Resolution 72 “Measurement concerns related to human exposure to electromagnetic fields” . First agreed by the 2008 World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly in Johannesburg (WTSA-08) and revised by 2012’s WTSA in Dubai (WTSA-12), Resolution 72 recognizes the integral role that wireless technologies are playing in bridging the digital divide and responds to developing countries’ concerns with the risks of human exposure to EMF and local communities’ growing resistance to the deployment of radio installations in their surrounds. Specifically, the Resolution stresses the value of ITU-T guides on the use of international EMF-focused standards, with particular emphasis on those relating to measurement methodologies.

Malcolm Johnson, Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, ITU: “The rational solution to citizens’ concerns regarding exposure to EMFs is to ensure that the actions of national regulators and network operators are accompanied to the greatest possible extent by transparency and communication with citizens. Compliance with international standards and associated reporting mechanisms assures citizens that regulators and network operators have complied with international best practices in deploying base stations, thereby safeguarding citizens’ health.”

ITU-T Study Group 5 studies health considerations associated with wireless communications under Question 7/5 "Human exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) due to radiocommunication systems and mobile equipment" . The resulting ITU-T Recommendations give operators, manufacturers and government agencies the tools required to assess the EMF levels attributable to telecommunication and radiocommunication systems and to verify compliance with World Health Organization (WHO) recommended human-exposure guidelines set out by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) and the IEEE International Committee Electromagnetic Safety (ICES).

Question 7/5 has produced “EMF Estimator” software that calculates the cumulative radio frequency exposure levels in the vicinity of transmitting antennas. Part of Recommendation K.70 “Mitigation techniques to limit human exposure to EMF’s within vicinity of radiocommunication stations” , EMF Estimator contains a library of transmitting antennas’ radiation patterns for a wide range of radio communication and broadcast services. A typical application for EMF Estimator would be the calculation of EMF levels in a local community from a cellular base station or community broadcast service.

Another key reference for standards implementers is Recommendation ITU-T K.91 “Guidance for assessment, evaluation and monitoring of the human exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF EMF)” .ITU-T K.91 provides guidance on methods to assess and monitor human exposure to RF EMF in areas with surrounding radiocommunication installations; based on existing exposure and compliance standards in the frequency range of 9 kHz to 300 GHz. While existing standards are product or service-oriented, the K.91 guide is intended for the examination of areas accessible to people in the real environment of currently operated services with many different sources of RF EMF.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have a crucial role to play in tackling the developmental challenges facing the cities that are becoming our primary choice of habitation in the 21st century, concluded participants attending the 8th ITU Symposium on ICT and Environment Change, held in Turin, 6-7 May.

An estimated 65% of the world’s population now lives in cities. With an additional 1.3 million people moving from rural to urban areas every week, by 2050 more than six billion people will be living in urban agglomerations. In addition, the size of conurbations continues to grow, with the number of mega-cities of over 10 million inhabitants growing from just two in 1950 to 22 by 2015, 17 of which will be located in the developing world.

The symposium highlighted the importance of a globally coordinated approach and internationally standardized technologies in the creation of new ‘smart sustainable cities’. Greater integration of ICTs into urban planning will greatly facilitate opportunities for economic growth and social well-being, from better access to education and healthcare through to improved prospects of employment and living standards. The symposium concluded by issuing a call for stronger advocacy at the international level and for ICT policies to be integrated into the ongoing dialogues on urban development within the UN and other organizations.

Dr Hamadoun I. Touré, Secretary-General, ITU, “Rapid urbanization and high-density populations foment innovation and economic growth but also give rise to social, economic and environmental challenges, as cities’ infrastructures develop slower than the influx of new inhabitants. ICTs can make our cities safer, cleaner, and more convenient places to live.”

Full press release

Mihoko Sakurai and Jiro Kokuryo (Keio University, Japan); Richard Watson (University of Georgia, USA); and Chon Abraham (College of William and Mary, USA) took home 1st prize of 5,000 USD at the recent ITU Kaleidoscope conference: Building Sustainable Communities.

The winning paper is titled “Sustaining life during the early stages of disaster relief with a Frugal Information System: Learning from the Great East Japan Earthquake”. It advocates for the use of cell phones and the mobile Internet as the standard platform in creating information systems which prioritize resilience over robustness. Greater resilience is said to be achieved by deploying resources as frugally as possible and thereby limiting the number of resources exposed to damage in the event of a disaster.

Cybersecurity, climate change, future networks, cloud computing, optical wireless networks, and the resilience of telecoms infrastructure to natural disasters were just some the topics addressed by academic papers presented at the 2013 Kaleidoscope conference: Building Sustainable Communities.

Hosted by Kyoto University, Japan, 22-24 April – and informed to a great extent by lessons learnt from the Great East Japan Earthquake – Kaleidoscope 2013 sought to identify emerging ICT developments able to effect the change needed for communities to meet challenges posed by the new millennium.

Kaleidoscope 2013 was organized by ITU and technically co-sponsored by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan (IEICE) and was held at the invitation of Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC).

Additional support was provided by NICT, NTT, OKI, KDDI, NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Huawei Japan, Telkom South Africa, Blackberry, TTC, Waseda University (Japan), the Institute of Image Electronics Engineers of Japan (IIEEJ), the ITU Association of Japan, and the European Academy for Standardization (EURAS).

The event attracted over 180 delegates from 25 countries. 99 papers were submitted for review, 30 of which were presented at the conference by virtue of their being accepted for publication in the Kaleidoscope Proceedings and IEEE XPlore.

The other authors of award-winning papers sharing a prize fund of 10,000 USD were:

• 2nd prize (3,000 USD): “Telebiometric Information Security and Safety Management.” Phillip H Griffin (Booz Allen Hamilton, USA).
• 3rd prize (2,000 USD): “Innovation Management of Electrical Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Standards in the Sino-European Context” Martina Gerst, Xudong Gao (Tsinghua University, P.R. China).

The winning papers all share a close connection with on-going ITU-T standardization work. The first-prize submission will feed into the work of the ITU-T Focus Group on Disaster Relief Systems, Network Resilience and Recovery (FG-DR&NRR); the second-prize paper is of interest to ITU-T Study Group 17 (Security); and the third-prize winner ties in with the work of ITU-T Study Group 5 (Environment and climate change).

In addition, Dr Akihiro Nakao from University of Tokyo, Japan delivered a keynote address entitled “Deeply Programmable Network; Emerging Technologies for Network Virtualization and Software Defined Network (SDN)”. SDN was recently made a strategic priority for ITU-T by the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-12) in Dubai, UAE, 20-29 November 2012.

ITU Kaleidoscope conferences are peer reviewed academic events with a Steering Committee, and a 140-member Technical Programme Committee responsible for evaluating the submitted papers through a double-blind peer-review process.

The ITU-T Focus Group on Driver Distraction has presented its final deliverables in the form of five technical reports to form the basis for ITU-T’s accelerating standardization work in the driver distraction arena.

Established in February 2011, the Focus Group has been instrumental in raising awareness around ITU-T activity on driver distraction and the scale of this workload, as well as in providing clear direction to ITU-T’s driver-distraction work plan. The group has also been successful in opening lines of communication with key organizations and drawing new expertise into the ITU-T standardization process.

Scott Pennock’s recent article on the QNX Auto Blog provides the rationale for tackling driver distraction in ITU-T and also summarizes the use cases and user scenarios targeted by forthcoming ITU-T Recommendations.

Participants in an ITU workshop held for the benefit of government and private-sector technology leaders in the Nile River Basin have agreed a Call to Action which charges ITU with mobilizing its global membership to enable ‘smart’ water management.

The ‘smart’ integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in water networks adds communication, monitoring, analysis and control capabilities, increasing efficiency and reliability in water supply, improving delivery of water to crucial sectors like agriculture and health, and reducing water consumption and waste.

The ITU workshop ‘ICT as an enabler for smart water management’, was held in Luxor, Egypt, from 14-15 April 2013, hosted by Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. The event was the first of its kind, and reflects the growing importance and acceleration of smart-water standardization work in ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T).

Dr Hamadoun I. Touré, Secretary-General, ITU: “The importance of sufficient supplies of good quality water is recognized in the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), one of which is to halve the number of people without safe access to water by 2015. One of the many ways in which ICT will be central to the post-2015 development agenda is through supporting greater agility and efficiency in water management frameworks.”

Full press release

“Smart Sustainable Cities” is the theme of the 8th ITU Symposium on ICTs, the Environment and Climate Change to be held in Turin, Italy, 6-7 May 2013. The free of charge event is open to all and will bring together a global selection of specialists in the field – from top policy makers to thought leaders in business, engineering, standardization and research – to critique recent efforts in the development of smart cities and to determine the best path forward in the task of leveraging ICTs to enhance cities’ environmental sustainability.

The 2013 Symposium is organized by ITU in partnership with the Italian Ministry of Economic Development and will be hosted by Telecom Italia at its innovation laboratories in Turin. The event builds on the success of previous Symposia held from 2008 to 2012 in Kyoto, London, Quito, Seoul, Cairo, Accra and Montreal.

The upcoming Turin Symposium will address challenges and opportunities associated with the transition to a greener, more resource-efficient global economy through mitigation and adaptation to climate change; tackling e-waste; disaster preparedness; methodologies to assess the environmental impacts of ICTs; and cost-effective ICTs to empower smart cities and societies. Items on the Symposium’s agenda include:

• Energy efficiency, clean power and the smart grid as engines for urban sustainable growth
• Assessing environmental impacts in cities 
• Integrated ICT solutions for smart sustainable cities and empowered citizens
• Tackling e-waste and solid waste issues in cities
• ICTs to monitor the climateClimate change adaptation and emergency telecommunications in urban areas
• Smart sustainable cities

The Symposium will be held in conjunction with the first meeting of the ITU-T Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities, 8 May 2013, and a Workshop on Human Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields, 9 May 2013.

Find more information on the Symposium including details of how to register here.

The 2013 World Standards Day poster competition will award a cash prize of 1,500 Swiss francs to the creator of the poster that best illustrates the theme: "International standards ensure positive change".

The winning poster will provide the visual identity to World Standards Day, 14 October 2013, an international day of observance recognized worldwide since 1970. In addition to the first prize of 1,500 Swiss francs, the poster competition’s three runners-up will each receive a cash prize of 500 Swiss francs.

Coordinated by IEC, ISO and ITU, World Standards Day celebrates the collaborative efforts of the thousands of public and private-sector experts that volunteer their time and expertise in the development of international technical standards.

International standards represent the consensus view of the world’s leading experts in industry sectors ranging from energy utilities and energy efficiency to transportation, management systems, climate change, healthcare, safety, and information and communication technology (ICT). Contributing their knowledge in service of the public interest, experts in these and many other subjects come together to create standards that share innovation with all the world’s countries and so provide business, government and society with a solid platform for positive change.

The deadline for submissions to the poster competition is 10 June 2013. Designers are welcome to submit more than one entry to the competition.

The competition’s Facebook page will provide interactive guidance to potential entrants throughout the course the competition. The winning poster will be decided by a public vote wherein all interested parties will vote for their favourite poster.

The competition’s Twitter account will announce key dates and point followers to relevant supporting information.

See the themes and winning posters of previous World Standards Days here and more on this year's competition here.

“It is with the deepest regret that I announce the death of my colleague and close friend, Dr. Cynthia Waddell, a lifelong advocate for the rights of persons with disabilities and a world-renowned expert in disability rights law, public policy and electronic and information technology.

The improving accessibility of technologies, the built environment and the job market owes an incredible amount to Cynthia’s achievements over a lifetime dedicated to enhancing social inclusion for the roughly 650 million people across the world living with some form of disability.

Cynthia was held in the highest esteem by all those fortunate enough to have worked with her. She will be sorely missed by her colleagues, friends and the millions of people around the globe to have benefited from her tireless advocacy and activism.”*

*This is an extract from a blog piece in tribute to Cynthia Waddell. Entitled “Accessibility Loses a Great Champion”, the article is authored by Andrea Saks, Convener of ITU’s Joint Coordination Activity on Accessibility and Human Factors (JCA-AHF) and Coordinator of the Internet Governance Forum’s Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability (DCAD).

Read the full blog piece here

Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, an ITU-T academic member, made a significant contribution to the current meeting of ITU-T Study Group 12, on a method of video quality of experience (QoE) monitoring which drills deep into network performance, identifying service degradation by precisely calculating video stalling and rebuffering times.

Progressive download video services, such as YouTube, are responsible for a major part of the data volume in the telecommunication networks. Streaming video quality depends on sustainable throughput during transmission. To ensure acceptable video quality, the customer's perceived quality (QoE) needs to be monitored.

Experts have been calling for algorithms that provide measurement results that can give insight to end user QoE, that can in turn be used for network planning and traffic engineering. The Chemnitz University contribution was timely as a separate contribution to the same meeting called for exactly such a method to be developed.

The contribution proposes a network-based parameter-extraction applicable to video QoE estimation that allows for transparent monitoring without the need to install tools at end-user devices or on the server.

Study Group 12 has considered the contribution as part of a new international standard (ITU-T Recommendation). Consequently the two authors, Thomas Knoll and Marcus Eckert, will have their contribution recognised internationally.

Knoll and Eckert chose to supplement their formal presentation to Study Group 12 with an implementation and online demonstration, which according to the study group Chairman, Kwame Baah-Acheamfuor, was a first that gave delegates an unprecedented opportunity to see exactly how the contribution could be applied.

Participation of academics in the work of ITU-T provides invaluable networking opportunities and the chance to gain an understanding of the requirements of the industry.

More details can be found in the contributions (ITU members only) here and here. Alternatively here or for contribution details and publications.

Meeting at ITU headquarters in Geneva, 21-22 March 2013, the TSB Director’s Ad Hoc Group on IPR (IPR AHG) has continued making headway in its bid to ensure protection of the integrity of the standards-development process by clarifying aspects of ITU’s Patent Policy and related Guidelines– the Union’s main tool to manage the challenges associated with the incorporation of patents in standards (ITU-T Recommendations).

The licensing of standards-essential patents (SEPs) on reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms is a cornerstone of the standards-development process. The incorporation of SEPs on a RAND basis incentivizes the inclusion of cutting-edge patented technology in technical standards, while also ensuring that the holder of a SEP cannot abuse the dominant market position it gains from widespread adoption of a voluntary technical standard.

The IPR AHG has been active for over fiften years, providing a forum for experts to exchange views on IPR matters and offer advice on the best approach to the patent-standard relationship.

In recent months, certain stakeholders as well as competition authorities have raised concerns regarding the increase in standards-related patent litigation as well as the possible use of SEPs to exclude competitors from a market. American and European regulators have in addition expressed concerns with the possible use of SEPs to pressure standards implementers into accepting higher royalties in bi-lateral licensing negotiations – also referred to as patent hold-ups – an act which undermines the aims of RAND to the disadvantage of standards implementers, hurting the consumers ultimately shouldering these higher costs.

Against this backdrop, ITU held a high-profile Patent Roundtable in October 2012 which assembled all the key private-sector and regulatory players to unravel the source of SEP-related litigation and to plot the course to an appropriate remedy.

Acting on the conclusions of this Roundtable, the IPR AHG is currently undertaking an accelerated series of meetings, targeting two specific questions:

the conditions under which companies that have made RAND commitments should or should not be allowed to seek injunctions; and the clarification of the meaning of the word "reasonable" in the RAND context.

The next meeting of the IPR AHG will take place at ITU headquarters in Geneva, 25-26 April 2013.

A video message from the TSB Director to the IPR AHG can be viewed here.

ITU members have agreed new standards (ITU-T Recommendations) on cloud computing, ‘smart’ ubiquitous networks and security requirements for the interconnection of emergency telecoms services.

The standards were agreed at a recent meeting of ITU-T Study Group 13 – Future Networks including cloud computing, mobile and next-generation networks. The meeting also agreed the publication of three new technical papers:

• Migration scenarios from legacy networks to NGN in developing countries
• How to increase QoS/QoE of IP-based Platform
• Mobility Management in ITU-T: Its Current development and Next Steps Heading Towards Future Networks

The SG13 meeting finalized the approval of Recommendation ITU-T Y.2705, Minimum Security Requirements for Interconnection of Emergency Telecommunications Service (ETS), and reached first-stage approval (consent) of the first ITU standards on cloud computing:

• Recommendation ITU-T Y.3501, Cloud computing framework and high-level requirements
• Recommendation ITU-T Y.3510, Cloud Computing Infrastructure Requirements
• Recommendation ITU-T Y.3520, Cloud computing framework for end to end resource management

Other noteworthy standards reaching first-stage approval include two new recommendations on smart ubiquitous networks, a central force in the evolution towards more human-centric ICTs:

• Recommendation ITU-T Y.3041, Smart Ubiquitous Networks – Overview
• Recommendation ITU-T Y.3042, Smart Ubiquitous Networks – Smart Traffic Control and Resource Management Functions

Following the adoption of a Resolution on Software Defined Networking (SDN) at last November’s World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-12) in Dubai, much discussion was also dedicated to planning the course of ITU’s standardization work on this important work area. In addition, ITU-T Study Group 17 participants were invited to discuss the division of work between the two groups as it relates to standards for security in cloud computing.

More information on ITU-T Study Group 13 is available here

ITU has approved an action plan to drive its Conformance and Interoperability (C&I) Programme and has revamped the Joint Coordination Activity which marshals C&I work undertaken across ITU’s various expert groups.

Conformance with international standards is one of the core principles underlying the global interoperability of ICT networks and devices. The C&I Programme was initiated at the request of ITU’s membership in light of the challenges faced by developing countries in improving interoperability and battling counterfeit goods.

ITU-T Study Group 11 – Protocols and test specifications – was charged with coordinating the C&I Programme by last November’s World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-12) in Dubai.

Meeting at ITU headquarters in Geneva, 25 February to 1 March 2013, SG11 approved a C&I action plan in line with WTSA-12’s revision of Resolution 76 on “Studies related to conformance and interoperability testing, assistance to developing countries, and a possible future ITU Mark programme”.

The SG11 meeting also saw substantial progress made in ITU’s collaboration with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and advanced the group’s ongoing work on software-defined networking (SDN). Read news on these achievements here.

The Joint Coordination Activity on C&I testing (JCA-CIT), which now falls under the leadership of SG11, will support the coordination of the ITU’s C&I activities while also acting as the first point of contact for organizations interested in contributing to this work. SG11 has revised JCA-CIT’s governing Terms of Reference and has appointed a new Convener in Mr. Martin Brand from Telekom Austria, an active SG11 member over the previous study period and appointed an SG11 Vice-chairman by WTSA-12. The next meeting of JCA-CIT will be held electronically, 25 April 2013, and detailed participation instructions will be provided on the JCA-CIT homepage.

Delivering on a central objective of the C&I program, SG11’s meeting reached first-stage approval (consent) of five new testing suites to become international standards (ITU-T Recommendations).

The meeting also hosted a presentation delivered by the Executive Secretary and Chairman of IECEE, the Worldwide System for Conformity Testing and Certification of Electrotechnical Equipment and Components. IECEE presented on its conformance assessment scheme and encouraged ITU to make full use of this platform in carrying out the C&I Programme.

In addition, SG11 produced an initial list of key technologies within its mandate which the group considers suitable for C&I testing. This will remain a living list and it forms input to the first pillar of the four-pillar C&I Programme which delineates C&I work into four separate but interdependent categories:

1) conformance assessment;

2) interoperability events;

3) human resource and capacity building; and

4) assistance in the establishment of test facilities in developing countries.

More information on ITU’s C&I Programme is available here

More information on ITU-T Study Group 11 is available here

ITU-T’s latest Technology Watch report covers Seoul’s emergence as a “smart city” applying information and communication technologies (ICTs) as basic infrastructure to improve service delivery, citizen happiness, and economic and environmental sustainability. Read or download the full report here.

The report will feed into the work of the recently established ITU-T Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities (news on the formation of the Focus Group here). With the new activities ITU aims to better facilitate collaboration among national regulators, mayor’s networks, citizens, standards bodies, equipment manufacturers, civil society and other smart-city stakeholders.

Authored by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, with support from ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), “Seoul – a case study” offers an overview of the conceptual underpinnings of Seoul’s smart-technology agenda as well as descriptions of a number of the smart services available to citizens.

Seoul, the Republic of Korea’s capital city, is just one of many cities across the world to embrace ICTs as tools to boost economic and environmental efficiency, enhance government transparency and improve social welfare.

Rapid urbanization and high-density populations are powerful engines of innovation but also give rise to social, economic and environmental challenges as cities’ infrastructures develop comparatively slower than influxes of city inhabitants.

Cities today account for more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 60-80% of global energy consumption and it is estimated that, by 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be urban. Smarter, cleaner, more efficient cities are thus imperative to sustainable growth strategies and will also be crucial to boosting cities’ competitiveness and attractiveness as players in our global economy.

All published ITU-T Technology Watch reports are available free of charge here

Meeting at ITU headquarters in Geneva, ITU-T Study Group 11 – Protocols and test specifications – received 72 participants from 22 countries, representing a 53 per cent increase over the participation numbers recorded for its previous meeting in June 2012.

The meeting saw substantial progress made in ITU’s collaboration with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and also advanced the group’s ongoing work on software-defined networking (SDN) and conformance and interoperability (C&I) testing. Read news on the meeting's C&I achievements here. 

OpenGeoSMS is a standard maintained by OGC, originally developed by the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). Study Group 11 continues to collaborate with OGC with a view to formalizing OpenGeoSMS as an international standard (ITU-T Recommendation). The standard uses Short Message Service (SMS) to exchange location-based information and is considered particularly important in providing relief to individuals affected by natural disasters.

Expanding and accelerating standardization work on software-defined networking (SDN) was one of the key directives issued by ITU’s membership at last November’s World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-12) in Dubai.

In the interests of greater speed and flexibility in routing instructions, security and energy management of network equipment such as routers and switches, SDN proposes to decouple the control and data planes and allow for programmable interfaces to these planes; letting software do the job traditionally performed by the control plane.

ITU’s standardization work on SDN started in ITU-T Study Group 13 – Future networks including cloud computing, mobile and next-generation networks. SG 13 standardizes SDN’s functional requirements and architectures, and SG 11 thus works closely with SG 13 as it builds on this work by developing SDN’s signaling requirements and protocols.

SG 11’s recent meeting in Geneva received contributions calling for new SDN work items, including:

• Scenarios and signaling requirements for software-defined BAN (SBAN)
• Framework of signalling for SDN
• Scenarios and signalling requirements of unified intelligent programmable interface for IPv6

The next meeting of SG 11 is scheduled to take place in Uganda, 6-15 November 2013, in collocation with the next meeting of SG 13 to strengthen the collaboration between these groups.

More information on ITU-T Study Group 11 is available here

More information on ITU-T Study Group 13 is available here

San Salvador, El Salvador will host a “Central American Workshop for Capacity Building on Environmentally Sound Management of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)”, 19-21 March 2013. The workshop will provide training on the application of global best practices in environmentally responsible e-waste management, covering e-waste’s collection, repair, refurbishment, recycling and disposal.
 
Electrical and electronic waste (known as ‘WEEE’ or ‘e-waste’) is the world’s fastest-growing source of waste. Eco-friendly disposal and recycling mechanisms will mitigate e-waste’s negative environmental and health effects, but will also create new employment opportunities while recycling critical raw materials and decreasing resource-dependency.  
 
The upcoming workshop is organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Secretariat of the Basel, Stockholm and Rotterdam Conventions (SBSR), a body administered by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The event is organized in partnership with the Basel Convention Regional Center for Central America and Mexico (BCRC-CAM); the Central American Commission for Environment and Development (CCAD); the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources of El Salvador (MARN); the Central American Regional Technical Commission on Telecommunications (COMTELCA); the Salvadoran General Superintendency for Electricity and Telecommunications (SIGET); and the Partnership for Action on Computing Equipment (PACE) established under the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal.
 
The workshop is the first joint training activity undertaken by ITU and SBSR, and participation is free of charge.
 
The event will outline e-waste management methods detailed by ITU’s international standards (ITU-T Recommendations) and ITU’s Toolkit on End of Life Management for ICT Equipment.
 
The workshop will also present PACE’s Environmentally Sound Management (ESM) Criteria Recommendations; its Guideline on Environmentally Sound Testing, Refurbishment and Repair of Used Computing Equipment; its Guideline on Environmentally Sound Material Recovery/Recycling of End-of-Life Computing Equipment; and its Guidance on Transboundary Movement (TBM) of Used and End-of-Life Computing Equipment.
 
Other sessions will discuss the role that standards and policies play in tackling e-waste by encouraging the application of global environmental best practices and by underscoring the implementation of national and regional e-waste management strategies.
 
The workshop will conclude with a session inviting equipment manufacturers, government representatives and leading e-waste recycling specialists to discuss the development of Central America’s sub-regional systems for e-waste’s repair, refurbishment, recycling and disposal.
 
The workshop will be conducted in English and Spanish.
 
More information on the workshop, including a provisional programme and an online registration form, can be found here
 
More information on ITU-T activities on ICTs, the Environment and Climate Change can be found here

ITU-T has established a new Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities to assess the standardization requirements of cities aiming to boost their social, economic and environmental sustainability through the integration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in their infrastructures and operations.

ITU-T Study Group 5 – Environment and climate change – agreed the formation of the new Focus Group at its meeting in Geneva, 29 January to 7 February 2013.

The creation of the Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities answers a Call to Action on “Smart Sustainable Cities” proposed in September 2012 at ITU’s 2^nd Green Standards Week in Paris. “Smart Sustainable Cities’’ is also the theme of ITU’s 3^rd Green ICT Application Challenge.

Cities are powerful engines of economic growth, fuelled by intensive interpersonal communication and high concentrations of specialized skills. Urbanization’s advantages are however mirrored by significant sustainability challenges, with cities today accounting for over 70 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 60-80 per cent of global energy consumption.

Given that an estimated 70 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, sustainable urbanization has become a key policy point to administrations across the world. Here ICTs have a crucial role to play by increasing environmental efficiency across industry sectors and enabling such innovations as intelligent transport systems (ITS) and "smart" water, energy and waste management.

The Focus Group will act as an open platform for smart-city stakeholders – such as municipalities; academic and research institutes; non-governmental organizations (NGOs); and ICT organizations, industry forums and consortia – to exchange knowledge in the interests of identifying the standardized frameworks needed to support the integration of ICT services in smart cities.

Focus Group leadership team:

Chairman 
   -    Silvia Guzman, Telefónica

Vice-Chairmen 
   -    Pablo Bilbao, Federation Argentina de Municipios

   -    Flavio Cucchietti, Telecom Italia

   -    Sekhar Kondepudi, National University of Singapore

   -    Nasser Saleh Al Marzouqi, UAE

   -    Franz Zichy, USA

   -    Ziqin Sang, Fiberhome Technologies Group

Specific tasks and deliverables of the Focus Group include:

   - Defining the role of ICTs in environmentally sustainable smart cities, and identifying the ICT systems necessary to the development of a Smart Sustainable City.

   - Collecting and documenting information on existing smart city initiatives and technical specifications, focusing in particular on the identification of standardization gaps.

   - Identifying or developing a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to gauge the success of smart-city ICT deployments.

   - Establishing relationships and liaison mechanisms with other bodies engaged in smart-city studies and development.

   - Identifying future smart-city standardization projects to be undertaken by its parent group, ITU-T Study Group 5.

   - Developing a roadmap for the ICT sector’s contribution to Smart Sustainable Cities, providing cohesion to the development and application of technologies and standards.

The meeting also agreed first-stage approval (consent) of the latest addition to ITU-T’s L.1400 series of standardized methodologies to assess the environmental impact of ICTs. The consent adds “ICT projects” to the list of ICT deployment scenarios covered by ITU-T’s environmental impact assessment methodologies. The new methodology (ITU-T L.1430) provides a framework to measure reductions in GHG emissions and energy consumption resulting from implementations of ICT projects including smart buildings, smart transport, and telepresence or videoconferencing services.

More information on ITU-T, Environment and Climate Change here

For the second year running, ITU-standardized IPTV technologies have been deployed in an international IPTV experiment held in conjunction with the Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan, 5-11 February 2013. The experiment ran over ITU’s IPTV IPv6 Global Testbed and was successful in its ambitious attempt to employ ten software-defined networks (SDNs) simultaneously.

ITU headquarters in Geneva received high-definition IPTV content from the head-end server in Japan via a native end-to-end IPv6 connection, participating alongside broadcasters, government agencies, network operators, manufacturers and research institutes from Japan, Singapore and the Philippines.

IPTV services were used to live-stream scenes from Sapporo and to provide supporting Video on Demand (VoD) segments, accompanied by integrated social media tools and a remotely-provided captioning service. A particular achievement was the use of RISE, a next-generation Internet based on OpenFlow, to deliver IPTV content to Singapore where IPv4 and IPv6 were combined virtually (more on ITU and IPv6 here).

Core ITU standards underpinning the experiment included Recommendation ITU-T H.721’s IPTV terminal for Video on Demand (VoD) and Linear TV, and ITU-T H.762’s Lightweight Interactive Multimedia Environment (LIME) for interactive IPTV services.

Building on the success of similar events in 2012, Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Hokkaido Television Broadcasting (HTB) and OKI continue to provide the infrastructure underlying what has become known as ITU’s IPTV IPv6 Global Testbed.

The experiment was organized by NICT and conducted over its IPv6 research network, Japan Gigabit Network-eXtreme (JGN-X). Other participating organizations included ASTEM, MediaEdge, NTT, NTT Communications, NTT Electronics and Sumitomo Electric Networks from Japan; the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) from Singapore; Ateneo de Manila University, Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) and the Information and Communications Technology Office of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST ICTO) from the Philippines; and Swisscom from Switzerland.

Such experiments – together with ITU IPTV Interoperability events – are important steps towards broadening the IPTV market through globally-interoperable services. Standardized IPTV will lead to a whole new market for innovation, and ITU standards will ensure this market remains open, competitive and accessible to all.

ITU-T Study Group 16 is producing the standards required to drive widespread adoption of IPTV. Global standards will lower the costs of these services for vendors and consumers, avoiding costly ‘format wars’ and enabling rollouts of the technology to a scale not achievable with proprietary solutions.

For more on ITU-T’s work on IPTV, please see ITU’s IPTV Global Standards Initiative.

An upcoming workshop on the Fully Networked Car, the eighth event in the series, will host an international selection of experts to discuss the latest developments in the intelligent transport space with a view to building consensus on the best path towards global standards for a safer, cleaner and far more connected driving experience. Responding to rapid progression in the sophistication of intelligent transport systems (ITS), the workshop’s discussions will conclude by setting the standardization agenda and industry priorities for the coming year.
 
Organized by IEC, ISO and ITU under the banner of the World Standards Cooperation, the “Fully Networked Car 2013 – The Future of Vehicles” is being held 6 March 2013 at Palexpo in Geneva. It will take place within the Geneva International Motor Show. With 6 March being the final press day of the Motor Show, workshop participants will gain exclusive insight into car manufacturers’ latest products as well as their visions of what consumers can expect in the future.
 
Fully Networked Car 2013 will be moderated for the second consecutive year by Richard Parry-Jones, a former executive at Ford Motor Company, and it will analyze developments in the automotive sphere with a particular focus on the ICT standardization needed to support recent advances in automotive ICTs. The workshop will assemble industry-leading minds from both the automotive and ICT communities; moving towards better collaboration by these industry sectors and thus more efficient development and adoption of the global standards needed to drive large-scale rollouts of ITS.
 
So-called “cooperative ITS” – in which vehicles communicate with each other and with the infrastructure around them – has the potential to enable more efficient traffic management, less congestion, fewer accidents and lower volumes of greenhouse gas emissions. Standards for cooperative ITS will thus be a central topic at March’s workshop, as will energy efficiency and standardization work concerning electric vehicles and smart grids.
 
Other key topics will be standardization to minimize driver distraction and enhance vehicle safety as the use and inclusion of ICTs in automobiles increases, as will comparisons of the tremendously different ITS challenges and opportunities encountered by developing and developed countries.
 
Registration to attend the event closes 22 February 2013.
 
More information is available here
 
To drive the creation of an internationally accepted, globally harmonized set of ITS communication standards, ITU and other organizations with ITS activities have established an open collaboration group that next meets 21-22 March 2013 in Beijing, China.

Attendees of the fourth meeting of ITU’s Focus Group on Disaster Relief, Network Resilience and Recovery (FG-DR&NRR) will participate in a one-day technical tour of Sendai city, the area hardest hit by 2011’s Great East Japan Earthquake, visiting affected telecommunication installations and R&D sites specialized in the study of network resilience and recovery.

Organized by ITU-T and hosted by Japan’s Ministry of Internal affairs and Communications (MIC) and National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), the fourth meeting of FG-DR&NRR will take place in Tokyo, Japan, 5-8 February 2013.

The meeting is preceded by an ITU workshop on “e-Health services in low-resource settings: Requirements and ITU role”, 4-5 February 2013, at the same venue. FG-DR&NRR participants are encouraged to attend this workshop, and particularly the afternoon sessions on the 5th where e-health applications related to disaster relief will be on show.

ITU-T Focus Groups are tasked with initiating work on new standardization challenges as input to the ITU-T Study Groups. Focus groups have a great deal of flexibility to decide their structure and working methods and participation is free of charge and open to non-members of ITU.

FG-DR&NRR was established in January 2012 at a meeting of the Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group (TSAG). The group coordinates ITU-T’s current work in the disaster relief field, and is expanding this work into two important new areas: (1) disaster relief for individuals (to notify relatives, friends or employers of a victim’s situation) and (2) disaster relief guidance (to show victims the routes to evacuation shelters, home, etc.).

Read more on FG-DR&NRR and its upcoming meeting here

Successor to award-winning standard to unleash new innovation
Geneva, 25 January 2013 – A new video coding standard building on the PrimeTime Emmy award winning ITU-T H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC was agreed by ITU members today.

The new codec will considerably ease the burden on global networks where, by some estimates, video accounts for more than half of bandwidth use. The new standard, known informally as ‘High Efficiency Video Coding’ (HEVC) will need only half the bit rate of its predecessor, ITU-T H.264 / MPEG-4 Part 10 ‘Advanced Video Coding’ (AVC), which currently accounts for over 80 per cent of all web video. HEVC will unleash a new phase of innovation in video production spanning the whole ICT spectrum, from mobile devices through to Ultra-High Definition TV.

ITU-T’s Study Group 16 has agreed first-stage approval (consent) of the much-anticipated standard known formally as Recommendation ITU-T H.265 or ISO/IEC 23008-2. It is the product of collaboration between the ITU Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).

Full Press release

An ITU workshop "e-Health services in low-resource settings: Requirements and ITU role" will take place in Tokyo, Japan, 4-5 February 2013, at the kind invitation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) of Japan.

The workshop is a follow-up to the Joint ITU-WHO workshop on e-health Standards and Interoperability held in Geneva, April 2012. It aims at facilitating information sharing between e-health experts and to increase the understanding between developed and developing countries of what are the common threads, the different priorities and the challenges for the implementation of e-health services in low-resource settings.

The overarching goal is to identify a comprehensive roadmap for ITU activities towards implementation of e-health services in low-resource settings that includes the necessary standardization and interoperability studies. In addition, the results of this workshop will feed into the work of the relevant ITU-D and ITU-T Study Groups as well as the ITU-T Focus Group on Machine to Machine (M2M) Service Layer.

The workshop is open to interested participants and experts from the Asia-Pacific region, ITU Member States, Sector Members, ITU-D and ITU-T Study Group Associates, including representatives from regional and international organizations.

More information can be found here.

Geneva, 20 December, 2012 – ITU together with Telefónica will today launch the 3rd Green ICT Application Challenge. A prize of 5,000 US dollars will be awarded to the application that best helps to promote Smart Sustainable Cities and environmental sustainability in urban areas.

The impact of urban areas on natural resources necessitates a path of sustainable growth and development for the expansion of cities. It is expected that 70 per cent of the world population will be urban by 2050, and that most of this growth will occur in less developed countries. Cities currently emit 71 per cent of total greenhouse gases and consume between 60 and 80 per cent of the world’s energy. Innovative use of ICTs can drive solutions to make cities more efficient and sustainable.

Full press release

Adopting six new Resolutions, ITU’s membership has called on ITU-T to expand its work on e-health, software-defined networking (SDN) and e-waste. In addition, members have called for the establishment of a Review Committee to ensure that ITU-T’s structure continues to meet the needs of the continually evolving and convergent ICT landscape, particularly as collaboration with vertical markets increases. This will help to enable such innovations as e-health, intelligent transport systems, smart grid, mobile money and e-learning.

This post originally from The Assembly a blog covering WTSA 12

Full release