ITU International Telecommunication Union

Background and Scope

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is the original global standards body founded more than 150 years ago in 1865. While it was always intended to form agreements between nation states, this was established more formally in 1947 when the ITU was incorporated into the United Nations. While many aspects of ITU feel similar to other standards bodies, there are aspects where the UN affiliation is apparent, not least in the location of the headquarters building in Geneva, and the availability of simultaneous translation.

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In principle, the ITU covers all aspects of telecoms including radio spectrum management. However, in many areas, it no longer develops and publishes the detailed standards for the industry. For example, with mobile, the ITU will discuss the longer-term direction and ambition for mobile, including future band allocations, but the detailed specification is mostly done by 3GPP.

There are areas where the ITU remains the primary place where technical standards are developed and agreed, notably for optical fibre, access and core fibre transport systems, and timing and synchronisation standards.

Organisation and Working Methods

Whilst technically the membership of the ITU is the nation state, the ITU also works by organisation, and delegates attend meetings representing both their organisation and their country. In highly technical areas like optics and synchronisation, as with other standards bodies, technical expertise and technical merit are much more important than any ‘country position’. Indeed, the founding principle of the ITU going back to 1865 is ‘contribution-led, consensus-based’.

The ITU work programme is formed in cycles called study periods, normally of around four years, and starts with a World Telecommunication Standardisation Assembly (WTSA) which sets ‘questions’ for the study period and appoints people to chair ‘study groups’ (SGs).The SGs work on these questions and then publish ‘recommendations’ in response.

Normally SGs are subdivided into Working Groups (WGs) and within each WG, each question is assigned one or more ‘rapporteurs’.The rapporteur is effectively an editor for the recommendations which emerge from the question, and report on the progress of the work.

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Documentation

Historically, recommendations were only published at the end of the study period, but recommendations are now approved as they are ready. In line with the UN parentage, recommendations are normally translated in many different languages, but in case of any ambiguity, the authoritative version is the one in which the recommendation was originally drafted, which is typically English.

Accessing documentation

Approved recommendations are freely available online, however working documents can only be accessed with a registered online ITU account.

ITU-R Recommendations - List of all ITU-R Recommendations in force

ITU Publications : Standardization (ITU-T)