Category Archives: Plenary

Close of WTSA-12 marks the start of a new era for ITU-T

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WTSA-12 Closing Ceremony

WTSA-12 Closing Ceremony: Mr Brahima Sanou, Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau; Mr Mohamed Al Ghanim, Director General, TRA, UAE; Mr Malcolm Johnson, Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau; Mr Mohammed Gheyath, TRA, UAE, Chairman WTSA-12; Mr Gheyath’s father; Dr Hamadoun Touré, Secretary General, ITU; Mr Houlin Zhao, Deputy Secretary General, ITU; and Mr Francois Rancy, Director of the Radiocommunication Bureau

Adopting six new Resolutions, ITU’s membership has called on ITU-T to expand its work on e-health, software-defined networking (SDN) and e-waste. In addition, members have called for the establishment of a Review Committee to ensure that ITU-T’s structure continues to meet the needs of the continually evolving and convergent ICT landscape, particularly as collaboration with vertical markets increases. This will help to enable such innovations as e-health, intelligent transport systems, smart grid, mobile money and e-learning.

WTSA-12 was the best-attended Assembly yet, attracting over 1000 participants from 101 countries. The Assembly appointed four new Chairs and more than fifty new Vice-chairs to ITU-T’s expert groups, and deliberations over the last ten days have taken into account over 240 documents in over 30 different working groups.

WTSA-12 also called on ITU-T to ensure that new ITU standards (ITU-T Recommendations) are accompanied by implementation guidelines, and another Resolution invites ITU Member States to refrain from taking any unilateral and/or discriminatory actions that could impede access to Internet sites or resources.

Read the full press release here.

ITU members resolve to end discriminatory access to the Internet

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Internet Open

Photo by Blaise Alleyne, CC BY 2.0

WTSA-12 has adopted a Resolution inviting ITU Member States to refrain from taking any unilateral and/or discriminatory actions that could impede another Member State from accessing public Internet sites and using resources, within the spirit of Article 1 of the Constitution and the WSIS principles.

Noting the global and open nature of the Internet as a driving force in accelerating progress towards development in its various forms and that discrimination regarding access to the Internet could greatly affect developing countries; Resolution 69, “Non-discriminatory access and use of Internet resources,” invites affected ITU Member States to report to ITU on any unilateral and/or discriminatory actions that could impede another Member State from accessing public Internet sites and using resources, within the spirit of Article 1 of the Constitution and the WSIS principles.

The adoption of Resolution 69 underlines ITU’s commitment to a free and inclusive information society and sends a strong message to the international community in response to accusation that ITU’s membership wishes to restrict the freedom of speech.

ITU’s work, along with many others, has played a key role in enabling the Internet. Without ITU standards providing the access technologies to homes and businesses and the transport mechanisms to carry information from one side of the world to another, the broadband services that we have come to rely on would simply not work.

Also see ITU Press Release.

Compromise found, ITU standard for remote management of network access devices approved

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Mr Yoichi Maeda, Chairman, ITU-T Study Group 15, addressing the WTSA-12 Plenary

Mr Yoichi Maeda, Chairman, ITU-T Study Group 15, addressing the WTSA-12 Plenary

ITU-T Study Group 15 Chairman, Yoichi Maeda, today presented a compromise proposal developed by several delegations which cleared the way for approval of Recommendation ITU-T G.9980. The standard defines requirements for service providers’ remote management of networked devices in customers’ homes.

The compromise was achieved after including a statement in the scope of the Recommendation which reminds implementers and users to comply with all applicable national and regional laws, regulations and policies.

Recommendation ITU-T G.9980 Remote management of CPE over broadband networks – CPE WAN Management Protocol (CWMP) is based on a Broadband Forum protocol commonly referred to as TR-069. The protocol may be used to manage various types of customer premises equipment (CPE), including stand-alone routers and LAN-side client devices. Functionalities include:

  • auto-configuration and dynamic service provisioning;
  • software/firmware image management;
  • status and performance monitoring;
  • diagnostics.

Though it depends on IP-layer connectivity, CWMP is agnostic to the specific access medium utilized by the service provider.

Recommendation ITU-T G.9980 will be made available free of charge at http://itu.int/ITU-T/recommendations/.

Work in Committees gets underway

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Mohammed Gheyath, WTSA-12 Chairman

Mohammed Gheyath, WTSA-12 Chairman

WTSA-12’s opening session under the Chairmanship of Mohammed Gheyath (Executive Director, Policies & Programs/Information & E-Government Sector, Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, UAE) saw the approval of committees’ structure and leadership.

Work was assigned to five Committees:

1)      Steering Committee (ensures the smooth execution of the work of the Assembly);

2)      Budget Control (examines the total expenditure of the Assembly and estimates the budgetary requirements of ITU-T up to the next WTSA (2016));

3)      Working methods of ITU-T;

4)      ITU-T work programme and organization; and

5)      Editorial Committee (enhances the clarity of wording used in texts arising from WTSA deliberations, such as resolutions, without altering their sense and substance).

The complete terms of reference of all Committees are reproduced in Document DT/4-E (requires a TIES account).

Delegates have started reviewing the inputs and proposals submitted by ITU’s membership in the respective committees and will report the results of these discussions to Plenary at a later stage.

Unopposed approval of MPLS-TP carrier network standards

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Participants at WTSA-12 have approved key standards (ITU-T Recommendations) on a technology for multiprotocol label switching – transport profile (MPLS-TP) required by telecoms operators to increase network efficiency while also reducing capex and opex costs.

Recommendation ITU-T G.8113.1, “Operations, Administration and Maintenance mechanism for MPLS-TP in Packet Transport Network (PTN),” provides an Ethernet-based protocol for operations, administration and management (OAM) in Transport Networks. MPLS can carry packets of different types, allowing telecom operators to offer private connections as well as IP services. Many network operators expect MPLS-TP to work under the same principles as longstanding ITU transport network technologies like SDH and OTN. MPLS-TP provides network operators with a reliable packet-based technology, the operation of which aligns with current organizational processes and large-scale work procedures. Its deployment may reduce the need for layer 3 routing in an operator’s network.

Recommendation ITU-T G.8113.2/Y.1372.2, “Operations, administration and maintenance mechanisms for MPLS-TP networks using the tools defined for MPLS,” is an extension to the IETF’s MPLS protocol and is developed in cooperation with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is a Transport Profile of MPLS and can be used for OAM in Transport Networks.

The IETF is soon expected to provide an ACh codepoint for the Ethernet-based OAM protocols.

Also approved during the first plenary of the Assembly were Recommendation ITU-T D.195 (“Time-scale for settlement of accounts for international telecommunication services”), ITU-T Y.2770 (“Requirements for Deep Packet Inspection in Next Generation Networks”) (with modification) and ITU-T G.9901 (“Narrowband OFDM Power Line Communication Transceivers – Power spectral density (PSD) specification”).