Summary

The purpose of this ITU-T Recommendation is to define the Generic Multimedia Conversational Service and to describe their general features, regardless of the network environment in which these services are provided. These services allow conversational communication between two users in two different locations. The Generic Multimedia Conversational Services are one of the generic service types identified in ITU-T Recommendation F.700, and their description follows the methodology described therein. The user requirements for the various applications supported by the service are translated into generic service specifications, independent of the constraints of specific implementations. Thus this ITU-T Recommendation sets out the requirements that will satisfy the users' needs and allow proper intercommunication on an international basis of services offered by different providers and of equipments from different manufacturers.

Various instances (profiles) of this generic service are considered here with a network independent view. Specific service descriptions for each network will be issued in other Recommendations. The detailed technical specifications of the terminal, network and protocol aspects for each of them are described in dedicated ITU-T Recommendations of the H.200, H.300, H.400 series.

Along with the F.700 methodology, the description relies on the media components and the communication tasks described respectively in Annexes A and B of ITU-T Recommendation F.700 together with the middleware service elements in Annexes C for control and processing functions. These are service independent modular communication capabilities.