Nartus

Standardization aspects have been addressed in the project with particular focus on communication with standard making and regulatory bodies to influence the development of international standards.

Users are invited to take part to the definition of specifications of various technologies and applications.

ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, offers to users several channels to participate, individually or at the organisation level, and influence the definition of standards in Europe:

·       ETSI membership: ETSI's Members actively participate in the work of the institute; they determine ETSI's work program, allocate resources and approve its deliverables.

·       Specialist Task Force (STF), which consists of a team of highly-skilled experts working together over a pre-defined period to draft an ETSI standard under the technical guidance of an ETSI Technical Body and with the support of the ETSI Secretariat. The task of the STFs is to accelerate the standardization process in areas of strategic importance and in response to urgent market needs.

·       Technical committees/projects

·       Partnership projects, notably the project MESA which is producing the specifications for an advanced digital mobile broadband standard much beyond the scope of currently known technologies. 

·       Special Committees and, especially, the EMTEL committee dedicated to emergency communications and the User Group, which consists of a consultation body on user needs and requirements.

In 2008, according to the ETSI Annual Report[1], the User Group continued with its work to improve the quality of the service delivered to the user. Providers tend to agree that, when Quality of Service (QoS) deteriorates at the network borders, the cause is usually inadequate standardisation of the interfaces. The Group is therefore reviewing the standardisation at these interfaces to identify deficiencies, and an ETSI Specialist Task Force (STF) was established in September 2008 to undertake the investigation. The STF will also make proposals to improve the situation. During 2009, the Group expects to produce a Technical Report covering four aspects of this issue: a control plan solution for QoS signalling, a management plan solution for QoS interworking, QoS continuity and QoS informational structure.

Two other STFs were to be set up in 2009 to pursue other aspects of QoS: one will assess the QoS of the service life cycle to identify missing test protocols; the other will address the audit and approval of metering and billing systems.

An ETSI Special Report was published in September 2008, which provides guidance for users choosing between various telecommunication service offers. 

Collaboration with ETSI’s Human Factors Technical Committee (TC HF) continues on a regular basis; a joint meeting of TC HF and the User Group was held again in 2008. The User Group also collaborated with other ETSI committees including the Speech and Multimedia Transmission Quality Technical Committee (TC STQ), notably in its work on the quality of service of network interfaces, and the Telecommunication and Internet converged Services and Protocols for Advanced Networking Technical Committee (TC TISPAN). 

The User Group also liaises with organisations outside ETSI, including the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and the Telecommunications Standardisation sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T). The ETSI User Group could therefore act as a gateway to other standardization bodies and the PSCE Forum User Committee is encouraged to liaise with it.

Moreover, the official liaison of PSC Europe Forum with Study Group 2 of ITU-T (the PSC Europe Forum is under the umbrella of the European Commission (EC) and the EC is already a Sector Member of the ITU-T) should endeavour the participation of users to ITU-T activities.

ITU-T SG2 works and has the lead on Telecommunication for Disaster Relief/Early Warning.  An important achievement by SG 2 in the field of Telecommunication for Disaster Relief was the March 2000 approval of ITU-T Rec. E.106, "International Emergency Preference Scheme (IEPS) for disaster relief operations". The Recommendation, updated in October 2003, describes a scheme for the use of public telecommunications by national authorities in emergency and disaster relief operations.

At a national level, users may also take part to the telecommunications services market analysis carried on by regulatory bodies in each country throughout Europe.

For example, in France, as a consequence of the liberalisation of this sector, which (except for the mobile telephony sector) had previously been a legal monopoly, the ARCEP (Autorité de Régulation des Communications Electroniques et des Postes) was created by the law of 1996 to regulate the telecommunications sector. Liberalising a market with extremely high entry barriers requires sector-based regulation, complementary to common competition law, to allow the entry of new players and the development of competition. Further, technological factors and cost structures, which naturally lead to a monopolistic situation, do not disappear with liberalisation. However, sector-based regulation will eventually be phased out and replaced by common competition law as competition on the various market segments of electronic communications become satisfactory. The ARCEP is conducting regular surveys with questionnaires on the telecommunications services market.

As another example, the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA), which welcomed a presentation of the PSCE Forum in September 2006, also carries market reviews, containing information on the growth of broadband, mobile and fixed telephone network subscriptions and the market shares of network subscriptions per operator. Reports also include information on the growth of fixed and mobile network telephone volumes and SMS and MMS messages sent from mobile communications subscriptions. These reports are available to the public on the agency’s website (http://www.ficora.fi).