The Hindu Business Line : Pilot project for next generation networks likely with DoT

THE Forum of the Asia Pacific Telecommunity Standardisation Programme (ASTAP), an expert body addressing telecommunications issues in the Asia-Pacific region, has taken up the challenge of standardisation process ahead of the World Telecom Standardisation Assembly (WTSA) 2004 meet by taking up pilot projects with the first such project likely to be with the Department of Telecommunications.

Areas such as Internet governance and management, international Internet charging, tackling the vexatious issue of Spam and standardisation of networks are among key areas the standardisation programme plans to address.

Towards handling these issues, the five-day Asia Pacific Telecommunity (APT) meet that ended here , decided to take up pilot projects that would seek to integrate various networks and, thereby, help in standardisation process.

First such project is proposed to be taken up with the DoT, Government, and another project on broadband through power lines is proposed in collaboration with the Malaysian Government.

Addressing a press conference here, the Executive Director of APT, Mr A. Narayan, Mr Peter Darling, an expert on next generation networks, said that the meeting evolved a strategy that outlines a set of principles for coordinating international telecommunications union activity. The areas range from identification of priority standardisation activities to operational level coordination.

Explaining the importance of this meeting, they said that the Asia Pacific community accounts for about 58 per cent of the global population and given the telecom penetration potential, it is projected to touch 40 per cent of the overall mobile users by 2008.

Given such a backdrop, the issue relating to standardisation of voice, video and data systems, and interoperability of various networks, the APT will take to pilot projects before helping other countries to adopt this pattern.

The proposed pilot project with the DoT is to be taken up in the area of next generation network on the Internet protocol where areas of voice, data and video can be offered seamlessly.