Industry leaders focus on 5G research, development and standardization
Chief Technology Officers highlight strategic priorities for ITU
standardization
Budapest, 14 October 2015 – Chief Technology Officers (CTO)
of leading companies in the field of information and communication technology
(ICT) have reaffirmed that 5G research and development, and supporting
standardization, will be industry’s top priority over the coming five years.
CTOs have also identified service interoperability in fixed-mobile hybrid
environments, trusted information infrastructure and open-source solutions as
topics of particular strategic importance to industry as we approach the 5G era.
Fourteen ICT leaders and the strategic management of the ITU
Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) met for the seventh annual
Chief Technology Officers’ meeting, held in conjunction with
ITU Telecom World 2015
in session in Budapest, Hungary, 12-15 October.
The
CTO meeting issued a
communiqué outlining emerging trends in the ICT industry
and associated demands on ITU standardization.
“ICTs will play a central role in shifting the world onto a sustainable and
resilient development path,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao in
addressing the CTO meeting. “I commend CTOs for their recognition of smart
cities, IoT applications and 5G systems as key technological developments to
assist in achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by world
leaders at the United Nations in September.”
In 2012, ITU established a programme on
International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT) for 2020 and beyond,
which provides the framework for 5G research and development worldwide. ITU’s
Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) is coordinating the international
standardization for 5G mobile development. ITU-T will play a similar convening
role for the technologies and architectures of the wireline elements of 5G
networks.
5G systems are expected to provide a future-proof basis for communications
from year 2020 onwards. Virtualization will play a key role in 5G networks,
giving networks the flexibility to adapt to changes in service requirements.
Highlighting that 5G will require an evolution of the concepts and architectures
of core networks, CTOs welcomed the efforts of the
ITU-T Focus Group on IMT-2020 to collect the views of
experts on how ITU-T standardization will contribute to this evolution. The CTO
meeting also welcomed the recent agreement of the
TSB
Director’s Ad Hoc Group on Intellectual Property Rights to study
potential approaches to the management of intellectual property rights (IPR) for
5G standards, and the interplay between IPR and open-source solutions in a
standardization context.
Service interoperability in fixed-mobile hybrid environments, including IoT,
will be crucial in supporting a wide variety of high-quality services. CTOs
recognized the need to expand access to high-quality, bi-directional services
and invited ITU-T to encourage the standardization, testing and interoperability
necessary to stimulate the rollout of these services in fields such as voice and
video. CTOs also highlighted the need to overcome interoperability challenges in
the IoT space. Acknowledging that IoT platforms are being developed in segments
according to the requirements of each vertical industry, the CTO meeting
encouraged ITU-T to focus its IoT standardization work on enabling
interoperability between different IoT segments.
Strengthening trust in telecommunications systems and ICTs will grant users
the confidence to expand the scope of their interactions within the Information
Society. CTOs agreed that trust should be considered a key component of the core
design principles of future ICT infrastructure. The CTO meeting offered support
for ITU-T to develop the frameworks required for trust provisioning in fields
such as IoT, cloud computing and big data, considering the new business models
emerging as part of the ‘sharing economy’.
Open-source software implementing virtualized infrastructure components is
playing an increasingly important role in the network, and CTOs present in
Budapest held the view that collaboration between the standardization and
open-source communities will provide further impetus to ICT convergence. The CTO
meeting encouraged ITU-T to study how it might accommodate the open-source
community, with prime areas for collaboration identified in network-function
virtualization, software-defined networking, cloud computing, IoT and video
coding. CTOs noted in addition that open-source implementations of certain
high-profile ITU-T standards might augment their influence, breadth of
application and ease of deployment.
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