25th Anniversary Celebration

As part of the 61st General Assembly on 19-20 March 2013, ETSI will celebrate 25 years of successsful standards making for European and global markets, with a Gala Dinner being held on the evening of 19 March.

All ETSI Members have been invited, with special guests including some attendees of that very first General Assembly.

25 years ago, in 1988, ETSI was founded. While the decision to create the institute was taken in 1987, ETSI was formally established the following year and the statues of the institute were adopted at the first General Assembly on 28-29 March that year.

ETSI was born into a world where portable PCs were briefcases too heavy to use on a lap; where mobile phones required car batteries for power and where paging was a promising new telecommunications service. Standards meetings were paper-based, with every delegate receiving his set of meeting documents by post in the weeks prior to a meeting, and the most important item of technology at a meeting was the photocopier.

Despite the absence of basic technology without which a standards body could not function today: laptops, e-mail, wifi, broadband, file servers and web conferencing to name but some, ETSI nevertheless succeeded to produce standards which would have a world-wide impact. GSM, DECT, TETRA and Euro-ISDN were some of the initial standardization projects undertaken, and these have been at the heart of ETSI’s success. ETSI’s technologies, the telecommunications market and the companies that served it all developed rapidly in step with each other, cementing ETSI’s position at the heart of the telecoms and ICT industries in Europe and beyond.

ETSI was designed from the outset to respond to the needs of industry, and was very different in concept from its sister European Standards Organizations CEN and CENELEC. With its unique mix of members from industry, academia, administrators and regulators, and with the counsel of the European Commission and EFTA, ETSI has become a venue for dialogue and discussion on ICT issues in Europe, as well as a recognised industry standards body in its own right.

The technologies discussed in our standards committees have changed or evolved, new members and new delegates constantly join our ranks, the committees themselves are created and renewed, but the spirit instilled in ETSI at the establishment of the institute still lives on. It is this which will enable ETSI to face the next 25 years with confidence.

Luis Jorge Romero, ETSI Director General
Dirk Weiler, ETSI General Assembly Chairman