The 18th meeting of the Global Standards Collaboration (GSC), a senior-level gathering of the world's leading information and communication technologies (ICT) standards organisations, took place on July 22 – 23, 2014, hosted by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) in Sophia Antipolis, France.
GSC enhances co-operation among standards organisations from different regions of the world to facilitate the exchange of information on standards development, build synergies and reduce duplication of work.
The 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 harmonisation 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 standardisation 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 organisations 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 standardisation 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).
