Wireless Future - Telenor

Attempts to co-ordinate work in global and
regional standardisation bodies have been made
through Joint Standards Collaboration meetings.
Also, there is a range of lobbying organisations
trying to move the work in certain directions.
ITU has identified some 600 fora and consortia
within the computing and telecommunication
domains. ITU-T has established a formal relationship
to some tens of these bodies. The fora
and consortia are often established by product
developers. Some have become very successful,
and in some cases they are competing with and
outperforming the traditional standardisation
organisations. The Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) is an example of this, and has challenged
ITU-T on protocol standardisation. The
Object Management Group (OMG) has had
great success on standardisation of higher level
protocols and software. Often, however, fora and
consortia need the standardisation organisations
to give credibility to their results and ensure
usage of them. TINA-C and EURESCOM are
organisations that have used ITU-T for this purpose.
It should be noted that the vendors attending
the fora and consortia are not a homogenous
body, but may have conflicting interests. Traditional
telecommunication operators, not developing
their own products, have a less central role
in many of the fora and consortia. There are
exceptions, as well. TeleManagement Forum
(TMF) is heavily influenced by traditional
telecommunication operators, while the main
beneficiaries may be new telecommunication
operators. Often the same experts or companies
play key roles in several of these bodies simultaneously,
making it difficult to overview the relationships
between the fora and the standardisation
organisations, as is the case between TMF
and ITU-T Study Group 4.
Fora and consortia have frequently been cleverer
to promote their results than the traditional standardisation
organisations. However, the standardisation
organisations are catching up. ITU-T
encourages its Study Groups to develop promotion
plans. Study Group 10 has started to give
tutorial presentations to newcomers and outsiders
in conjunction with every meeting. Also,
Study Group 10 members have established an
independent forum, the SDL Forum Society,
which organises conferences and seminars.
Together with the ETSI MTS group, these
organisations provide a triangle organisation
which uses each other’s strengths. This way,
Study Group 10 has already achieved some of
the flexibility that is sought through the ITU
Reform.
It is frequently claimed that standardisation
organisations are too slow and bureaucratic.
However, the statistics show that in ITU-T the
Telektronikk 1.2001
time from initiation of work to approval of the
Recommendation is shorter than the comparable
time in many recognised fora. This is impressive,
since ITU-T often puts more emphasis on
ensuring the technical and formal quality of documents
than the fora. Experience shows that
results from fora have to be considerably reworked
to become an ITU-T Recommendation.
Also, the strife to provide open standards for
implementation by anybody, implies that ITU-T
puts more emphasis on formal specification of
protocols, test suites and languages than in many
other organisations. I fear that continuing pressure
to increase the production speed will reduce
the quality of ITU-T Recommendations. Contrary
to the strife for openness and high quality
of ITU-T Recommendations, some fora may
with their low quality output documents be suspected
to have a hidden agenda to provide some
competitive advantage to their fora members.
On the other hand, while some fora provide their
documents free of charge, ITU-T Recommendations
have a relatively high price, which may
reduce their widespread use. On an experimental
basis, ITU-T will in 2001 allow any users to
download 3 Recommendations free of charge.
Given the different roles of ITU members and
high membership fees, it is difficult to reorganise
ITU to take on new challenges and attract
the right newcomers to the work. It seems to
be much easier to establish a new forum with a
clear objective and appropriate membership to
carry out its mission. The membership fee for
Associates in ITU-T is still too high to attract
university members. Capability to make rapid
reorientation is the area where ITU-T necessarily
comes short compared to fora and consortia.
Maybe this situation could be improved by trying
to develop rolling (bottom-up) technology
strategies for ITU-T.
Fora can be more flexible than ITU-T by producing
technical specifications not satisfying the
same formal requirements as ITU-T recommendations.
This could be a convenient division of
roles between technology development and standardisation.
However, there is a danger that the
experts will attend the technology development
and not standardisation if these two phases are
split on different organisations. Even establishment
of fora work practises within ITU cannot
outrule the establishment of independent fora.
Therefore, ITU-T should continue co-operation
with these fora and focus on its role as the preeminent
global standardisation organisation for
telecommunications. The use of Focus Groups
within ITU-T and the establishment of the Special
Study Group on IMT-2000 and beyond are
attempts to provide fora work practices within
ITU-T.
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