The 18th meeting of the Global Standards Collaboration (GSC), a senior-level gathering of the world’s leading information and communication technologies (ICT) standards organizations, took place on July 22-23, 2014, hosted by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) in Sophia Antipolis, France.
GSC enhances co-operation among standards organizations from different regions of the world to facilitate the exchange of information on standards development, build synergies and reduce duplication of work.
This GSC meeting focused on three topics where standards play a major role in the development of technologies that bring benefits to consumers and businesses: critical communications, machine to machine communications and software defined networking.
The GSC coverage of critical communications included subjects such as communications systems for public safety services, large-scale public warning systems, emergency calling systems and communications systems for disaster relief situations. Standards address each of these systems and there is a wealth of experience regarding their use in each region of the globe. It is essential that lessons learned be taken into account, and that teams of disaster relief specialists do not face communications difficulties from incompatible equipment. The GSC seeks to reduce these difficulties and improve critical communications services through global harmonization of standards.
The interconnection of billions of devices and their generation of ‘big data’ was also a topic of discussion at this GSC meeting. The many standardization initiatives underway and the relationships between them were explored. The success of machine to machine communications and the Internet of Things (IoT) will depend on the availability of globally accepted standards and associated economies of scale. The GSC members, together with a number of participating stakeholder organizations from the healthcare, automotive and other industries, discussed the development of M2M/IoT standardization.
The GSC meeting discussed the rapidly progressing topics of network functions virtualization (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN), which will provide greater flexibility to network operators, allowing them to provide new services faster and more efficiently. The GSC meeting provided an opportunity to better understand the many distributed and potentially complementary industry initiatives, as well as the synergies between NFV and SDN. Speakers shared details of the progress that has been made in setting the architectural frameworks, use cases and proofs of concept upon which current and future standardization activities will be based.
A delegation from the Government of India participated in this meeting and announced TSDSI (Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India) as their national telecommunications standards organization.
GSC welcomed two new members at this meeting: the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) and the Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI). With these new members, GSC now includes the following standards organizations:
• ARIB – Association of Radio Industries and Businesses – Japan
• ATIS – Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions – U.S.
• CCSA – China Communications Standards Association
• ETSI – European Telecommunications Standards Institute
• IEEE-SA – IEEE Standards Association
• ISACC – ICT Standards Advisory Council of Canada
• ITU – International Telecommunication Union
• TIA – Telecommunications Industry Association – U.S.
• TSDSI – Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India
• TTA – Telecommunications Technology Association – Korea
• TTC – Telecommunication Technology Committee – Japan
Guest representatives from the following organizations were also present:
• GISFI – Global ICT Standardization Forum for India
• GM – General Motors
• HGI – Home Gateway Initiative
• ISO – International Organization for Standardization
• ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1
• OMA – Open Mobile Alliance
• PCHA – Personal Connected Health Alliance (Continua)
• TCCA – TETRA and Critical Communications Association
• W3C – World Wide Web Consortium
For further information on this GSC meeting, visit www.etsi.org/gsc-18.
