(ETSI) The European Telecommunications Standards Institute
With almost 700 Members from 55 countries around the world the Institute brings together manufacturers, network operators, administrations, service providers, research bodies and users – to write technical standards for the ICT sector.
ETSI consists of a General Assembly, a Board, a Technical Organization and a Secretariat, which is headed by its Director-General – Dr. Walter Weigel.
The General Assembly (GA) is the highest authority of the Institute and comprises all ETSI Members.
The ETSI Board is the executive arm of the GA and acts on behalf of the GA between GA meetings.
The Technical Organization (TO) is responsible for ETSI’s technical work, producing and approving ETSI’s deliverables. The main activities of creating and developing standards are performed in the Technical Committees, which bring together more than 3500 experts in over 200 working groups.
The headquarters of ETSI are located in Sophia Antipolis, a high tech research park in Southern France. The Secretariat is based here and comprises about 100 technical and support staff from all over Europe and beyond, who support the Technical Organization and assist the operation of the Institute.
The ETSI website and portal, plus those hosted by ETSI (such as the 3GPP website) have become the hub of this work, with a total of around 12 000 visits per day.
ETSI has a web site at www.etsi.org
The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)
ETSI is one of the founding partners of the Third Generation Partnership Project, in which the Institute comes together with five other regional standardisation organisations in Asia and the USA, plus market associations and several hundred individual companies.
3GPP was established to develop globally applicable specifications for third generation mobile telecommunications (the ITU IMT-2000 family), 3GPP is also responsible for the maintenance and evolution of the specifications for the enormously successful GSM!" standard and transitional technologies towards 3G (GPRS and EDGE). Current work is focusing on the evolution of the UMTS standard to provide even better performance (LTE).
3GPP has a web site at: www.3gpp.org
