The MultiService Forum (MSF) has forged an exclusive partnership with standards development entity ATIS to test and validate key IPTV building blocks relating to authentication and initialization.
The testing -- carried out across five interconnected labs in China, the United States and Europe -- will take place at the MSF's biennial Global MSF Interoperability (GMI) event to be held Oct. 20-30, 2008. The preliminary list of vendor participants announced Wednesday include Acme Packet, Codenomicon, Empirix, Huawei, NEC, Nokia-Siemens Networks, Nortel, OSI, Starent, Teles and ZTE. Verizon Communications Inc., BT and China Mobile will act as service provider partners.
The partnership between ATIS and the MSF brings together ATIS' global reach in IPTV standards development with the MSF's proven success at validating key Next Generation Network (NGN) concepts. The ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) is recognized globally as the leading developer of IPTV requirements, standards and specifications, and this new partnership will validate the IIF's efforts.
"We know the standards and the MSF brings the knowledge of how to test all the building blocks, so we've extremel;y excited," said ATIS President and CEO Susan Miller, at a press conference at NXTComm. "GMI will have open standards and an end-to-end deployment scenario at play. We feel that given the pace of IPTV rollouts across the globe, the time was right to do something like this."
The "real world" global network created between the labs will be used to verify the interoperability of critical NGN elements in a range of practical scenarios. Under scrutiny will be a range of service capabilities including end-to-end QoS, location management and SOA as well as IPTV.
