Established by the ATIS Board of Directors, the Technology and Operations (TOPS) Council identifies the industry’s most pressing technical and operational priorities, and coordinates standardization efforts industry-wide to produce interoperable, implementable, end-to-end solutions. To support its efforts, the Council establishes written work plans identifying areas of concentration for priority standards activities. Additionally, the Council oversees the progress toward completion of the work plans, as ATIS and other standards organizations execute the necessary standards work.

The TOPS Council is a standing committee of the ATIS Board of Directors and led by Balan Nair, chief technology officer for Qwest.

To date, the TOPS Council has reached consensus on the industry's 16 most critical priorities, including five deemed "most critical." Focus groups for each of the top five critical priorities were established in 2003, and led by members of the ATIS Board of Directors to examine the priority issues, set milestones, define needed deliverables and standards requirements, and develop a written work-plan that will guide ATIS’ coordination of the priority standards work.

The TOPS Council commissioned the creaction of the IPTV Exploratory Group to explore IPTV's ability to deliver on industry's expectations and user demands, and to assess areas in which ATIS may play a role in the development of industry standards in support of these goals.

The TOPS Council also commissioned the formation of a Focus Group in June 2004 to develop an ATIS set of requirements for NGN that includes multi-service architecture and evolution from currently deployed architectures to provide a more common architecture and set of service interfaces that will allow the seamless delivery of applications to customers while ensuring continued support for legacy networks.

In November 2004, ATIS released Part I of the ATIS NGN-FG efforts entitled, "ATIS Next Generation Network (NGN) Framework Part I: NGN Definitions, Requirements, and Architecture, Issue 1.0, November 2004."

TOPS Activities Page - Board Member Access Only

Next Generation Network
Chair: Bill O'Shea, President, Bell Laboratories/CTO and EVP, Corporate Strategy & Marketing, Lucent Technologies

The NGN-FG develops proposed ATIS requirements for NGN that includes a multi-service, access independent architecture and enables an evolution from currently deployed architectures to provide a common architecture and service interfaces that will allow the seamless delivery of applications to customers while ensuring continued support for existing services.
NGN-FG Members website

Security Issues (WORK PLAN COMPLETED - Click Here for Fact Sheet)
Chair: Kenny Frank, President, Alcatel

The Network Security focus group resolves and rationalizes security standards for next generation interfaces, 802.11 wireless LANs and IP networks.

This focus group utilized the findings from the ATIS Security Summit, "Security of Service Provider Infrastructure in an Era of Convergence," to define a coordinated standards development program for network security.
Security-FG members website

Voice over IP (WORK PLAN COMPLETED - Click Here for Fact Sheet)
Chair: Bill Smith, CTO, BellSouth

The VoIP focus group seeks to ensure interoperability of signaling and voice coding over IP networks, as well as interoperability between wireless and wireline packet networks.

Data Interchange (WORK PLAN COMPLETED - Click Here for Fact Sheet)
Chair: Venkates Swaminathan, Senior Vice President, NeuStar

The Data Interchange (Billing) focus group has developed a work plan for a service-neutral e-commerce framework. This framework will ensure the development of standard, secure processes, data models, protocols, and implementation agreements by which services can be ordered, provisioned, billed, settled, and managed.

Wide Area Ethernet (WORK PLAN COMPLETED - Click Here for Fact Sheet)
Chair: Joe Berthold, Vice President of Network Architecture, Ciena

The Wide Area Ethernet focus group will assess end-to-end Ethernet-based services across multiple transport networks such as public, private, cable, and wireless networks. Services to be explored include switched, point-to-point, point-to-multipoint and multipoint-to-point, multipoint-to-multipoint.

Mobile Wireless Services (WORK PLAN COMPLETED - Click Here for Fact Sheet)
Chair: Asok Chatterjee, Vice President of Public Affairs, Ericsson

The Mobile Wireless Services focus group is concentrating on resolving and rationalizing standards for 3rd Generation (3G) enhanced services such as multimedia messaging, location-based services, presence services and push services.

TOPS Council Critical Priorities

• Optical networks, including intelligent switching, customer interface, performance management, network control
• DSL evolution, including architecture evolution to IP services, VDSL, voice over DSL
• Wireless evolution, including enhanced data-rate for GSM evolution, UMTS, cdma, and defining 4G technologies/services
• IP telecom network management, including IP routing and traffic engineering
• Reliability measurements, including wireless/wireline outages, E-911 accuracy
• Wide area storage, including services to leverage transport capacity and e-Business centers
• Numbering, including number portability, telephone number mapping (ENUM)
• Emergency communications services for IP
• CALEA, including wireless and wireline wiretap
• E-911 evolution, including Phase 1 and II, wireless TTY calling
• Priority access, including wireless and wireline calling

For more information on ATIS TOPS Council activities, contact: Tim Jeffries at +1.202.662.8669 (tjeffries@atis.org), or Crystal Blue (cblue@atis.org) at +1.202.662.8653.