In a bid to reduce capital and operational costs in cyberspace, the United Nations telecommunications agency has approved a set of standards that will allow greater interoperability between different network elements, reducing the need for extra investment.
The agency’s standards making arm is the first to complete the work long sought after by the industry, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced today in a news release in Geneva.
Interworking standards mean that service providers will no longer be restricted to the products of one company, ITU said. Moreover, the emerging standards will allow service providers to use existing technologies to transport data at greater speeds. An overriding objective is the reduction of complexity in rolling out new services and a more efficient use of equipment, it added.
ITU-T, the standards making arm, is leading a more pragmatic approach to networking by providing standards that link disparate technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Multiprotocol Label Switching Standard (MPLS), providing interworking between two dominant technologies in the connection-oriented packet-switched network (co-ps) mode.