Participation of Brilliant Telecommunications, Inc. as an Associate of ITU-T Study Group 15

Episode 1 of TelecomTV's Green Planet features Malcolm Johnson, Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, ITU, talking about ITU's ICTs and Climate Change initiative.

The Green Planet series provides an overview of different elements of Sustainable ICT. Featuring leading scientists, politicians and heads of industry from across the globe, Green Planet is a timely and fascinating examination of issues and solutions that will change the world.

Watch here.

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Participation of Yaana Technologies, LLC as an Associate of ITU-T Study Group 17

The Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group (TSAG) concluding its three day meeting 30 April agreed on how work on ICTs and environment including climate change and recycling will be distributed in ITU-T. This follows its approval of the report of the Focus Group on ICTs and Climate Change and will formalize the Focus Group’s output as ITU-T Recommendations (see previous newslog) – including a methodology for evaluating the effects of ICTs on climate change - both in direct terms and how ICTs can reduce emission in other industry sectors.

Study Group 5 was chosen as the lead study group and will be renamed the Study Group on Environment and Climate Change to reflect its new mandate. SG 5 remains the lead Study Group for protection against electromagnetic effects.

Specifically SG 5 will work on documents related to:

• Study of methodologies for calculating the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from ICTs, and the amount of reduction in the GHG emissions in other sectors as a result of using ICTs.
• Creation of a framework for energy efficiency in the ICT field, taking account of WTSA Resolution 73.
• Study of methodologies for power feeding that effectively reduce power consumption and resource usage.
• Study of methodologies that reduce environmental effects for ICT facilities and equipment such as recycling,

Study Group 5 will next meet 25-29 May in Geneva and is likely to establish a new working party to address these issues. The many organisations that contributed to the work of the Focus Group will be open to contribute at the invitation of the Study Group chairman.

In addition a Joint Coordination Activity (JCA) will ensure that the work across ITU-T’s study groups is focused on delivering climate change focused standards in a timely and efficient way. Essentially the group will aim to see that standards are developed in the most appropriate way and that no duplication of effort occurs. It will also provide a single point of contact for ICT and Climate Change activities in ITU-T and seek collaboration from external bodies working in the field. It is expected that the work of the JCA will be carried out mainly via web-conferencing tools.

Full details will be published on the website of Study Group 5 and a soon to be created JCA page.

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A new white paper by Polycom highlights “G.719: The First ITU-T Standard for Full-Band Audio”.

Recommendation ITU-T G.719 describes a coding algorithm for conversational speech and audio supporting the full human auditory bandwidth (from 20 Hz to 20 kHz), that is, all sounds that a human can hear.

The paper concludes that “major technical achievements of the G.719 codec are its high quality and low complexity that make it perfect for devices ranging from telephones and low-power mobile devices to soft clients and to high end video and telepresence systems.” First products implementing ITU-T G.719 are expected to appear in 2009/2010.

The standard was developed in Study Group 16, ITU-T’s lead Study Group on multimedia coding, systems and applications, and adopted in June 2008.

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A new ITU-T Technology Watch Report titled The Future Internet surveys the current debate on Internet architecture.

The Internet has grown from a small experiment into a collaborative network with more than one billion users. The rise of mobile access poses additional infrastructure challenges including addressing, routing and security, which might require a review of the architecture.

The report examines the design and architecture of the Internet, and contrasts different views calling for evolutionary to radical changes to the Internet. Emerging trends and features of the Internet are identified in an attempt to provide pointers for future standards work for consideration by the ITU-T membership and the broader standards community.

The Future Internet, the tenth report of the Technology Watch series, is available to download here.

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