For Immediate Release
ATIS 1200 G Street, NW Suite 500 Washington, DC 20005	Contact: Trish Gessner Phone: 202-434-8851 E-mail: tgessner@atis.org www.atis.org

ATIS and ETSI TISPAN Share Vision for Global NGN Standards, Identify Next Steps

 ATIS Offers Details of its NGN Architecture and Framework Standards Effort

April 1, 2005, Herndon, Virginia – Representatives of ATIS member companies and the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) TISPAN Committee convened today in Herndon, Virginia, to discuss their respective standardization activities supporting the deployment of Next Generation Networks (NGN) and next steps for collaboration.

“Real business requirements are a key component of the overall picture, and must serve as the driver for any NGN global standards effort,” said Bill O’Shea, president of Bell Laboratories and CTO for Lucent Technologies. “As an industry, we need to support the ability of service providers to ensure interoperability across multiple regions of the world. ATIS and TISPAN will work together to coordinate standards work and has identified four specific areas for follow-up.”

As a result of the discussions, the participants of the joint meeting agreed to pursue four areas of common interest: NGN interconnect; emergency communications, including emergency identification and routing; user identification, number portability, ENUM and directory services; and security requirements and access agnostic solutions.

O’Shea serves as the Chair of the ATIS NGN Focus Group, organized by the ATIS Board’s Technology and Operations (TOPS) Council. In November 2004 the NGN Focus Group released the ATIS NGN Framework: NGN Definitions, Requirements and Architecture, which defines and identifies an NGN architecture as well as business and technology requirements for NGN from the perspective of ATIS member companies. Friday’s meeting was the first opportunity for face-to-face follow-up and collaboration for next steps in NGN development.

The meeting follows on the heels of a two-day workshop hosted by ATIS for the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and TISPAN to advance the technical work on the IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) architecture for use as a basis for the convergence of wireline and wireless multimedia networks. IMS, originally developed by 3GPP, is a key technology for wireless and wireline convergence in NGN.

 About ATIS

ATIS is a technical planning and standards development organization that is committed to rapidly developing and promoting technical and operations standards for the communications and related information technologies industry worldwide using a pragmatic, flexible and open approach. Participants from more than 350 communications companies are active in ATIS’ 22 industry committees and Incubator Solutions Program. www.atis.org

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