The main products of ITU-T are Recommendations (ITU-T Recs) – standards defining how telecommunication networks operate and interwork. See below list for access. ITU-T Recs have non-mandatory status until they are adopted in national laws. Levels of compliance are however high due to international applicability and the high quality guaranteed by the ITU-T’s secretariat and members from the world’s foremost ICT companies and global administrations.

There are well over 3000 Recommendations in force on topics from service definition to network architecture and security, from broadband DSL to Gbit/s optical transmission systems to next-generation networks (NGN) and IP-related issues, all together fundamental components of today’s information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Membership of ITU-T gives exclusive rights to access working documents of standards under development – tomorrow’s ICTs. The vast majority of all Recommendations are available in electronic (PDF) form free of charge to all once a final editing process is complete. Texts that are not free of charge include common ITU-T | ISO / IEC texts for which special arrangements exist. Find out more about membership here.

ITU-T Recommendations are now available through a new Website in tree views, offering multi-criteria search and cross navigation facilities. Each ITU-T Recommendation is now cross-linked to corresponding work programme, approval process, formal descriptions (more than 1100 freely available), test signals (more than 10 GB of data freely available), supplements, implementer's guide and IPR statements when applicable.