ITU to Develop NGN Standards

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will begin its process of developing global standards for next generation networks (NGN). The ITU said the need for global standards is critical as most operators expect to move to an IP infrastructure.



One area to be addressed by the ITU effort is the concept dubbed "nomadicity," which will give fixed line and mobile users completely seamless communication. Simply put this means the underlying technology will be invisible to the user regardless of a multi-service, multi-protocol, multi-vendor environment. An ITU-T Focus Group plans to build on existing fixed/mobile convergence architecture (e.g. 3GPP/3GPP2 IP multimedia subsystem (IMS)) to provide transparency between fixed and mobile networks.



In addition to setting standards for "nomadicity," other objectives of the Focus Group will be to develop specifications in the areas of Quality of Service in DSL, authentication, security and signalling.



The exact structure of the working groups will be decided next month. http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2004/05.html