President's Message

As many of you know, Washington DC has experienced a record-breaking winter, with almost five feet of snow. These snowstorms seriously impacted the region: more than 250,000 were left powerless, and the federal government and many Washington-area businesses were shuttered for five days, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in productivity losses.

During these storms, ATIS continued advancing our industry-driven work. Telecommuting – one of the multiple capabilities made possible by our past and continued efforts – enabled our sustained organizational effectiveness.

In that spirit of past and future achievement, this Newsletter includes a number of recently-accomplished initiatives, and several items to be delivered in the coming months. For example, ATIS’ TOPS Council has identified its priority initiatives, and our CIO Council has been very active enabling viable solutions to industry’s pressing IT-related problems, and is well-positioned for an impactful 2010.

As the snow melts, and spring arrives, our Committees, Councils and Forums will continue enabling industry’s business-driven solutions. And we now have a new, modern space to perform that work. Spring 2010 will see the opening of the newly renovated ATIS Conference Center. After 17 years, we have remodeled and transformed ATIS’ office space. Should you be in Washington over the coming months, I invite you to stop by and see our new home.

My best for your continued success,

President & CEO
Susan M. Miller

Facilities Consolidation Phase 1 Work Finalized

The TOPS Council’s Facilities Consolidation Task Force (FC-TF) recently finalized its Phase 1 work.

The FC-TF's deliverable examines how communications service providers can provide end-users with more cost-effective and environmentally friendly telecommunication services.

The Task Force has identified the five following, high-level challenges when consolidating facilities:

• Technology Considerations: As Time-Division Multiplexing usage declines, a migration strategy needs to be developed for TDM equipment.
• Disaster Recovery: Due to the potentially increased magnitude and impacts associated with failures or disaster situations, consolidated networks require increased redundancies and backups.
• Business Considerations: Network planning expenses will be incurred when determining how to best consolidate facilities.
• Regulatory Constraints: User benefits are dependent on tariff revisions, franchise agreements, coalition rules, regulations, and contractual arrangements.
• Standards Development: Existing industry standards need to be reviewed and modified, and new standards may need to be developed to accommodate facilities consolidation.

For more information about this work, please contact Tim Jeffries at: tjeffries@atis.org

TOPS Completes Green Life Cycle Assessment

ATIS’ TOPS Council recently prepared a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the Information Communications Technology (ICT) sector.

This LCA examines all levels of the ICT community’s manufacturing, supply, network design and operations, and provide strategies to ensure each is executed environmentally-efficiently. The report also provides a comprehensive review of current life cycle assessments, methodologies, tools, environmental impact databases, and existing standards. Further, it develops initiatives which can support the ICT industry’s future life cycle assessments.

The report aims to establish a unified system – such as common best practices – which can assist the ICT industry in evaluating its own sustainability performance, the sustainability conduct of its business partners (i.e., supply-chain), and to understand the implications and interactions between economic, social and environmental sustainability.

For more information about this work, please contact Tim Jeffries at: tjeffries@atis.org

CIO Council Strategically Positions for 2010

ATIS’ Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council is positioning itself for an active 2010. For those less familiar with the CIO Council, it provides the industry’s premier venue for service-provider, CIO-level representatives to proactively identify and resolve challenging IT issues of common interest.

The Council also provides direction for the development of industry standards, whitepapers and best practices supporting its priority initiatives. Indeed, the Council has already begun exploring multiple areas impacting the service provider community. Some of the Council’s recent initiatives include:

• Creating Working Groups to address implementation practices for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Enterprise Risk Management Strategies
• Exploring Web 2.0 solutions and naming representatives to participate on ATIS’ Service Oriented Networks (SON) Forum
• Supporting ATIS’ Environmental Sustainability Initiative, through continued discussions of power management in data centers

Council members are already realizing meaningful benefits from their membership. Examples of past accomplishments include the successful implementation of a program which assists customers moving across regional boundaries, and the formation of a metadata group in ATIS' IPTV Interoperability Forum which is currently addressing requirements for content on demand.

For more information about this work, please contact Maria Estefania at: mestefania@atis.org

Commercial Mobile Alert Standard Released and Designated as a DHS National Standard

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently approved the Joint ATIS/TIA Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) Federal Alert Gateway to CMSP Gateway Interface Specification (J-STD-101) as a DHS National Standard.

This standard was developed through substantial collaboration between ATIS and TIA. When fully implemented by communications service providers, this specification will provide anyone with a CMAS-capable mobile device an additional method to receive alerts during emergencies or natural disasters. The specification will benefit end users by allowing wider proliferation of 90 character text message emergency alerts and warnings of imminent threats to life and property, Amber Alerts, and Presidential emergency messages. In order to ensure coordination of industry and government requirements, ATIS and TIA members worked closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in this effort.

DHS’s designation of this specification as a National Standard - made possible through the collaborative efforts between industry and government - demonstrates that private sector-developed standards can meet DHS, FEMA, and other Federal agency needs as they seek to protect our citizens. Further, DHS’s adoption also establishes confidence in, and increases the visibility of, industry consensus standards within the homeland security community.

This new specification is available at http://engineers.ihs.com/

For more information about this work, please contact Maria Estefania at: mestefania@atis.org

ATIS Comments on ITU Database

Earlier this year, ATIS sent Malcolm Johnson, Director in the ITU’s Telecommunications Standardization Bureau a letter regarding its interoperability and recently-launched conformity assessment databases.

In its letter, ATIS communicated its concerns with the respective databases. While ATIS shares the ITU-T’s ultimate objective of promoting interoperability, ATIS strongly believes that these databases will not achieve this important goal and could, in fact, be detrimental to the ITU, the ICT industry and, perhaps most importantly, to consumers around the world.

For more information about this correspondence, please contact Tom Goode at: tgoode@atis.org

ATIS Comments on Net Neutrality

ATIS recently provided comments in the Federal Communications Commission’s so-called “Net Neutrality” docket. In its comments, ATIS supported the Commission’s recognition that its internet policies should be subject to reasonable network management and urged the Commission to continue to allow the industry to establish appropriate management techniques to meet evolving consumer needs.

The comments cited the ongoing work of ATIS’ Next Generation Interconnection Interoperability Forum, Telecom Management and Operations Committee, Network Performance, Reliability, and Quality of Service Committee and Wireless Technologies and Systems Committee to address a myriad network management issues. ATIS also recommended that the Commission not impose regulatory mandates on the potentially new “managed” or “specialized” service category, which includes IPTV. Instead, we urged the Commission to support collaborative, consensus-based and industry-driven developments of these services.

For more information about this filing, please contact Tom Goode at: tgoode@atis.org

IIF Partners with Video Services Forum

ATIS’ IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) Quality of Service (QoS) Metrics Committee and the Video Services Forum (VSF) Quality of Experience (QoE) Activity Group have agreed to partner in order to define additional IP video performance metrics.

Materially, this signed agreement will enable more precise measurement of next-generation IP video services’ quality. Such measurements are important in that they quantify and benchmark user experiences, and enable ongoing trials to improve service quality. Both groups will meet regularly to further this work, allowing each organization to provide input and expertise on the QoE metrics development process. The result will be an acceleration and alignment of critical QoE elements and improvement of existing processes and metrics.

This joint undertaking convenes experts from service provider, content provider, and measurement vendor spaces. By leveraging this wide array of industry expertise, the partnership will expand on the IIF’s already detailed standards which quantify consumers’ experience vis-à-vis IPTV quality. This joint effort will also more precisely measure how specific IP transport mechanisms impact video quality. The partnership is expected to generate its first performance metrics in 2010.

For more information about this work, please contact Maria Estefania at: mestefania@atis.org

NIPP Advances Priority Initiatives

ATIS' Network Interface, Power and Protection Committee (NIPP) Committee is set to deliver two sustainability-related standards.

First, NIPP’s Network Physical Protection (NPP) Subcommittee is developing a standard which defines telecommunications network equipment's heat dissipation requirements. These heat dissipation requirements can be used when designing improved cooling capabilities and can also impact equipment lineups and use. Essentially, service providers can leverage this heat dissipation data to assure equipment reliability through adequate cooling.

This standard also has implications for mechanical engineers and contractors. The standard can be used to determine the necessary cooling requirements in designing a network's equipment space, and while designing that equipment's layout and population within equipment frames.

NIPP’s Telecommunications Energy Efficiency (TEE) Subcommittee is also advancing a potential Technical Report: Energy Efficiency for Telecommunication Equipment: Methodology for Measurement and Reporting Facility Energy Efficiency.

This Technical Report provides network and facility operators a methodology which characterizes their facilities' energy efficiency. Materially, this report can be used to determine which facilities have unnecessary overhead costs and inefficiencies. Service providers and network operators can also use the report to determine the facility-level impact of equipment-level power consumption. These learnings can then be applied to controlled environments in central offices, network data centers, controlled environment vaults, telecommunications huts, and base stations.

For more information about this work, please contact Maria Estefania at: mestefania@atis.org

TFPC Addressing Denial of Service Attacks

Given the recent increase of Denial of Service attacks related to financial fraud, ATIS’ Telecommunications Fraud Prevention Committee (TFPC) recently accepted Issue 83, Rapid Response to Stopping Telephony Denial of Service Attacks across Multiple Networks. This Issue’s possible next steps include providing a best practices document for the investigation of, and the rapid shut down of, Denial of Service attacks across domestic networks. In addition, a rapid notification tool could be leveraged in order to identify the source of illegal telemarketing programs involving the use of spoofed/masked/missing ANI information.

For more information about this work, please contact Maria Estefania at: mestefania@atis.org

OBF Delivers NGN Business Requirements Roadmap

The Ordering and Billing Forum (OBF) recently published the Next Generation Network Operations Business and Functional Requirements for Ordering and Billing/Settlement. This document maps the business processes applicable in an IP-based packet environment. The processes outlined in the document describe the exchange of information necessary to accomplish NGN settlements such as retail billing, wholesale billing, intercarrier settlement, customer care, performance management, and traffic engineering.

OBF collaborated in the development of this standards document with other ATIS Committees, most notably the IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF), Packet Technologies and Systems Committee (PTSC), and the Telecommunications Management and Operations Committee (TMOC). Work will continue in order to identify and develop defined ordering and billing standards to a specific service level.

For more information about this work, please contact Maria Estefania at: mestefania@atis.org

Annual Meeting of the Committees (AMOC) 2010
Join ATIS for its Seventh AMOC!

At AMOC 2010, committee participants will engage in innovative joint work programs and create the standards which drive the industry’s deployment of new networks, products and services.

Join us at our Welcome Reception and ATIS’ Annual Meeting Awards Luncheon, which recognizes ATIS’ Forum and Committee standards experts. These experts’ contributions – and commitment to ATIS’ ongoing work – have been an integral component of the ICT industry’s evolution. Awards are given in the following categories: Leadership in Standards Development and Outstanding Contributions to an ATIS Forum or Committee.

AMOC 2010 is scheduled for April 19-23 at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, FL.

To learn more about AMOC 2010, visit: http://www.atis.org/annualmtg/2010/

For more information about AMOC 2010, please contact Maria Estefania at: mestefania@atis.org

ATIS Webinar Series Continues

ATIS continues its robust educational programming with a series of industry-driven Webinars. Intended to examine the ICT ecosystem’s continued evolution, these interactive presentations will explore how next generation networks, all-IP infrastructures, and multivendor environments will reshape the communications industry’s status-quo. Currently scheduled Webinars include:

May 4, 2010
Moving to LTE

May 20, 2010
The Transformation to All-IP - What Does it Really Mean for Carriers and the End User?
Sponsored by Nokia Siemens Networks

June 10, 2010
Multi-Directional Networking – Linking Data Center and IP Next Generation Networks
Sponsored by Cisco

June 22, 2010
IPTV Security

July 15, 2010
Multi-Vendor Care Services: Reduced Complexity Ensures Optimal Efficiency
Sponsored by Nokia Siemens Networks

September 16, 2010
Taking Subscriber Data Management to the Next Level
Sponsored by Nokia Siemens Networks

To learn more about ATIS Webinars, visit: http://www.atis.org/events/webinars.html

For more information on ATIS’ educational programming, please contact Lauren Layman at: llayman@atis.org