ETSI provides members with an open, inclusive and collaborative environment to support the timely development, ratification and testing of globally applicable standards for ICT-enabled systems, applications and services. ERTICO talks to Adrian Scrase of ETSI about the organisation’s work.
My career began in the traditional fixed telecommunications area within British Telecom in the UK. In 1984 I joined the Radio Regulatory Department of the DTI where I was involved in a broad variety of operations – including a spell in surveillance programmes. This brought me in to the mobile radio systems domain, which further sparked a long lasting interest in radio standards.
As the European Community expanded and the Single Market evolved, European network standards, and specifications for the nascent GSM system, became increasingly necessary – leading to the creation in 1988 of the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI). In 1991, I was seconded to ETSI, then recruited as a full-time employee, some two years later.
We believe that well-written and unambiguous European standards are setting the scene for standards uptake in other regions of the world too. ETSI now counts more than 900 member organizations worldwide, drawn from over 60 countries and five continents. We recognise a specification may originate from national standards needs and we embrace that approach, but we do now spend most of our time working with Regional and multi-National partners, on what are increasingly ‘Global’ solutions.
In addition to the direct participation of our members, to meet their standards needs, ERTICO is a key partner organization for ETSI. As a public private partnership, ERTICO unites the views of various stakeholders and offers us guidance on their requirements.
The EU-funded projects that ERTICO are implementing are of great interest, as they offer us a test bed for future standards based deployments. In my view, our standards do need the technical output from these research projects, as a central part of the innovation life cycle.
As technology evolves, large corporations will increasingly see ICT standardisation as being the level playing field, where they can commit to the maintenance of an interoperable, multi-vendor market place.
The involvement of new sectors in ICT standards is increasing and we have many new players, some with potentially conflicting requirements from the network.
I feel that through our partnership with ERTICO, we can act together to raise the level of dialogue on finding the best way to meet the growing demands on standards groups.
