ICT standards and their role in the industry development

Talking to professionals from different segments and areas of activity in the vast field of information and communication technologies (ICT) in various parts of the world, I notice great curiosity and interest, but also a certain lack of knowledge about the universe of standards and their relationships with the functions and activities of development, implementation and application in the various products, services and day-to-day processes of organizations and people. This universe has evolved a lot compared to past years, when I had an intense professional presence and activity in local, regional, and global standardization forums. One of the notable changes is the growing influence of specialized industry groups and consortia, which develop standards, either independently or in cooperation with national or international standards bodies. In the case of information technology, whose origin and commercial spread date back to the 1950s, at the end of the Second World War, there was, at first, an absence of substantial standardization, to a certain extent tolerated and even planned by the hegemonic actors, but the logic of standards imposed up as the industry matured. Currently, the major global forum is the ISO/IEC JTC1 (joint technical committee of ISO and IEC for information technology), but consortia and interest groups proliferate in virtually all areas of this huge field that constitutes the largest standardization effort and the largest international technical standards program in existence. In telecommunications, which, for understandable reasons, since its origins, in the mid-nineteenth century, developed under the aegis of standardization, there was a decline in the dominance of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union), a global intergovernmental forum affiliated with the ecosystem of United Nations, which progressively opened up to private participation and interaction. Even the UN itself has had continuous participation in the development of standards, especially those that are of direct interest to international trade, such as the UN/EDIFACT standards, related to the exchange of standardized international electronic messages for B2B, developed by the UN/CEFACT, a specialized center hosted by the Economic Commission for Europe, where I was privileged to serve as Vice Chair and Rapporteur for the Americas.

In the specific case of telecommunications, although there is a true silent revolution underway in independent private actors, the ITU still carries significant importance in its standardization sector (ITU-T). An example is the recent approval, by more than 190 members, within the scope of the organization's Study Group 20, of the security specifications for Internet of Things (IoT) systems, that will become part of the series of Recommendations Y-4500.3, which virtually completes the suite, the so-called OneM2M standard, a set of specifications for secure data exchange and interoperability across different industries, service providers and use cases, potentially reducing development costs and technology risks for end users.

Currently, for reasons that should be clear to friends reading me here, a major ongoing standardization effort concerns the continuing evolutionary dynamics of cellular mobile telecommunications, and particularly standards for the fifth generation (under global deployment and dissemination) and the sixth generation, the next, whose planning and standardization activities are at an early stage but gaining intensity and acceleration. Relevant players in the industry, operators, interested private and government entities seek to learn and become familiar with this dynamic, in order to be able to anticipate and influence trends and react appropriately, which requires competence, technical culture, dedication, continuous and mature participation processes in the relevant forums, not to mention trained human resources. The most important specialized consortium for the production of standards in this field is the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), an entity that brings together seven organizations for the development of telecommunications standards, with a presence in 42 countries and an extensive work program, developed in about 120 annual meetings, attended by just under 10 thousand delegates and generating more than 4000 different technical specifications. More than 400,000 technical contributions were received in the 3GPP's sixteen operational working groups, with around a third of them having been approved, generating a dynamic of successive establishment of releases (we are currently at Release 18). The vast majority of approved contributions are concentrated in a limited number of industry players (infrastructure providers such as Huawey, Ericsson and Nokia, chipset manufacturers such as Intel and Qualcomm, relevant handset manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, Lenovo and Apple) and representative operators (such as China Mobile and NTT Docomo).

I have briefly addressed here just a few examples of this vast and important field of technical standards in ICT. I hope this can serve as a small introduction and motivation for more actors to be interested in it. Standards forums represent a unique and irreplaceable way to acquire technical information, anticipate and influence trends and acquire technological and industrial relevance in any sector, and this is probably even more true in high technology sectors. Thanks in advance for any feedback you want to send me!