ITU’s oldest activity — developing internationally-agreed technical and operating standards and defining tariff and accounting principles for international telecommunication services — has helped the global telecommunication industry grow to become the world’s third-largest business sector with an annual value of over USD 1 trillion. Through its standard-setting arm, the Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), ITU fosters seamless interconnection of the world’s communication networks and systems.

International standards for information and communication technologies (in ITU parlance, ITU-T Recommendations) are growing in importance, not only because of globalization, but also because the ICT sector is one of the pillars of today’s economy. Whether we exchange voice, data or video messages, communications cannot take place without standards linking the sender and the receiver such as SS7, E.164, JPEG, MPEG, H.323, TCP/IP, GSM, ADSL, and so on. The telephone network, arguably one of the most complex projects ever undertaken, is based on a myriad of standards, and ITU’s work was instrumental in its creation.
 

ITU is the world's leading source of global telecommunications standards, with some 2’800 official ITU-T Recommendations currently in place, developed collaboratively by 189 governments and more than 400 public and private sector companies and regional/international organizations. ITU-T Recommendations cover every aspect of network operation, from numbering plans and accounting rates to the functioning of circuit-switched and packet-based voice and data networks.

In the field of global information infrastructure, ITU is leading the way through standards development efforts aimed at defining the building blocks of a new broadband global infrastructure. The next-generation network (NGN) is a key area of study for ITU, as operators around the world look to migrate to an IP-based infrastructure. The convergence between Internet protocol (IP), public switched telephone network (PSTN), digital subscriber line (DSL), cable television (CATV), wireless local area network (WLAN) and mobile technologies is a task that many believe is impossible without the development of global standards.
 

International standards-setting activities represent a global collective effort amounting to several hundreds of millions of dollars every year. ITU makes a vital contribution to this process with an open, worldwide membership and a collaborative, impartial approach.

Essential to the smooth functioning of the world’s fast-expanding communication networks, globally agreed, globally accepted standards allow all nations to benefit from access to leading-edge technologies and provide a basis for commercial application of technological advances on a global scale. Now, as an increasing number of operators re-orient their business plans to move to next-generation — all-IP — networks, ITU’s work programme is adapting and expanding to encompass developments in these systems.

With a majority of its membership from the private sector, ITU-T understands the crucial balance between rapid delivery and stability in standards development. The Sector has already made great progress in speeding up time-to-market of its Recommendations, and continues to work hard to ensure vital new standards are made available to the industry in the shortest possible time.
 

Throughout the course of every year, hundreds of experts gather at ITU meetings, contributing their time, know-how and expertise to the study groups which develop ITU-T Recommendations. ITU-T currently produces around 210 Recommendations each year — representing one new or updated standard for every working day.

Worldwide standards provide manufacturers with a solid basis on which to compete in the global marketplace, unhindered by technical barriers. Also, because global standards can translate into formidable economies of scale and lower development and hardware costs, they mean lower prices to end users. Finally, global standards protect users from incompatibility problems between rival systems — a situation which could prove disastrous in a world increasingly reliant on information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support economic activity and essential public services such as health care.
 

Developing global standards is a complex job, especially in today's dynamic telecommunication environment. Current challenges include:

ITU standards are impartial, globally applicable, of the highest quality and cover a very broad range of telecommunications technologies. They form a critical part of the global framework that enables the industry to function now and to grow into the future. This is why ITU keeps developing new standards to meet the industry's rapidly changing needs, while at the same time leading the industry drive to help the world communicate.
 

Recent years have seen growing concern over security in ICTs. ITU is increasingly active in this area. As well as authoring one of the most well known standards in the area, X.509, which is used for securing the connection between a browser and a server on the web and for providing digital signatures that enable e-commerce transactions to be conducted, ITU’s work covers security from network attacks, theft or denial of service, theft of identity, eavesdropping, telebiometrics for authentication, security for emergency telecommunications and telecommunication networks security requirements. Over 70 standards have been published by ITU in the security field.

Behind the success of the Internet are a number of other ITU-T standards. ASN.1 is a key part of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) that is used to manage the Internet’s operation. And the X.500 "domain name system" is used extensively within today’s IP-based networks in the form of object identifiers for object code modules for SNMP.

Thanks to the work of ITU-T study groups, web surfers around the world can access real-time video from remote servers through a host of ITU-T standards. H.264, the latest video compression algorithm, gives users unprecedented levels of quality. A raft of other standards help to create a better user experience — H.324 for low bit-rate multimedia, H.245 which specifies control protocols of multimedia communications and H.261, a source coding algorithm for video terminals, to name just a few.

H.323, which facilitates the delivery of voice, video and data over computer networks like the Internet, remains the most used standard for this job. The H.323 family of standards has been crucial in fostering the development of new voice-over-IP services (VoIP), winning widespread support from equipment vendors because it enables interoperability between products from different manufacturers.
 

Over the last decade, ITU has dramatically overhauled its standards-making, streamlining approval procedures and cutting development time by as much as 95 per cent. This means that an average standard, which took around four years to develop 10 years ago, can now be approved in as little as eight weeks for technical standards and nine months for Recommendations having policy or regulatory implications.

These productivity gains, brought about by the implementation of accelerated approval procedures, electronic processing and distribution of documents and more efficient office working methods, were effected to offer a better, faster service to members.

In an increasingly dynamic environment for telecommunication systems and services, ITU recognizes that its members rely on timely, stable standards which allow them to remain competitive yet protect their investment in manufacturing systems and costly research and development.
 

An increasingly competitive market means technical specifications for new systems are often hammered out between rival players. In such an environment, ITU provides a unique multilateral forum which allows competing interests to meet in an atmosphere of constructive debate, providing a framework for companies to mediate their differences for the benefit of consumers.