OCG ECN&S group - Sophia Antipolis

The 10th meeting of the Operational Co-ordination Group - Electronic Communications Networks and Services (OCG ECN&S) of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) was held on 23 August in Sophia Antipolis. Also participating in the gathering were EMTEL (Special Committee on Emergency Communications), the TC STQ (Technical Committee Speech Processing, Transmission and Quality Aspects) and JTC Broadcast (joint committee of ETSI, CENELEC and EBU for broadcasting issues).

EMTEL proposed the inclusion of deliverables for GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) and ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network). However, this intention will not be reflected in the list; the matters were kept out as they fulfilled one of the exclusion criteria formulated by the EGS group of the Communications Committee (COCOM), for they correspond to mature networks and stable technologies. Regarding Voice over IP (VoIP), given that there are still insufficient good operational guarantees for this network, its inclusion in the list was deemed premature.

Agreement was made to include the TC STQ deliverables in the list.

JTC Broadcast proposed the inclusion of two more API (Application Programming Interfaces) ? MHEG-5 and WTVML (Worldwide TV Mark-up Language) ? to join with MHP (Multimedia Home Platform). Although the final aim is to put together a list as synthetic as possible, the inclusion of three APIs is justified due to the special emphasis given interactive digital television in the Framework Directive, with an article of its own (art. 18).

Regarding the groups that work on standardisation to support regulation, and given that no comments whatsoever were received, the revision of the ECN&S terms of reference (ToR) was approved. The intention was also broached to form a standardisation group to support ECN&S ? HLRG (High Level Review Group).

Lastly, besides the short report in the COCOM plenary session, the 10th meeting also provided information on the Next Generation Networks (NGN) workshop, which was held in June and counted 150 participants.

The next OCG ECN&S meetings have been scheduled for 19 September at ETSI headquarters (Sophia Antipolis) and 11 October (the day before the COCOM plenary session) at the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) offices in Brussels.