Sophia Antipolis, 17 April 2024
During their 83rd General Assembly, 16-17 April 2024, ETSI members elected the ETSI Director-General Mr. Jan Ellsberger with a majority on the third ballot.
In the last three months, ETSI ISG MEC has released its final set of Phase 3 specifications and made significant progress on Phase 4 with the opening of new Work Items. In particular, the last Phase 3 version of MEC 011 (Edge Platform Application Enablement) contains the updates related to the latest alignment with 3GPP on CAPIF, thanks to a fruitful collaboration with SA6, CT3 and SA3 groups. Also, ISG MEC produced an updated version of MEC 040 (Federation Enablement APIs), that carefully considered the relevant work of other industry bodies relating to MEC federation and all relevant work done in ETSI. This work is critical for supporting the requirements from GSMA OPG (Operator Platform Group) to enable inter-MEC system communication and allow 5G operators to collaborate among themselves, with service cloud providers and with other stakeholders. New APIs are introduced for the enablement of MEC federation, helping operators to "federate" edge computing resources by offering their MEC service capabilities for mutual consumption, application developers and end-customers (e.g. vertical markets).
This year’s first ETSI Conference on Non-Terrestrial Networks has stressed the importance of technical standardization in delivering a fully connected planet via NTN, a key element of tomorrow’s global 6G networks.
Held from 3-4 April 2024 at ETSI’s Sophia Antipolis headquarters, the event was co-organized with the European Space Agency (ESA), the 6G Smart Networks and Services Industry Association (6G-IA) and the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU).
Titled ‘Non-Terrestrial Networks, a Native Component of 6G’, the 2-day conference attracted over 200 participants from 25 countries, including experts in standardization and research as well as industrial representation from the mobile, satellite and wider space industries. Delegates shared perspectives on NTN use cases, candidate technology solutions, current research status and standardization roadmaps. Day one sessions focused on the opportunities and challenges of integrating terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks within tomorrow’s global communications landscape. The second day afforded a deep dive into numerous cutting-edge NTN and 6G research & development initiatives in Europe and around the world.
ETSI is pleased to announce the release of the first two Group Reports developed by its Terahertz Industry Specification Group (ISG THz). They are addressing key elements in this initial phase of the pre-standardization works for THz communications: the use-cases and the spectrum. The role of ETSI ISG THz is to develop an environment where various actors from the academia, research centres, industry can share, in a consensus-driven way, their pre-standardization efforts on THz technology resulting from various collaborative research projects and global initiatives, paving the way towards future standardization. Complementing the work of other ETSI Technical Bodies and other SDOs, the group concentrates on establishing the technical foundation for the development and standardization of THz communications.
Sophia Antipolis, 8 March 2024
On 5 March, the European Standardization Organizations (ESOs), CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, joined forces with ENISA, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, to organize their 8th Cybersecurity Standardization Conference.
ETSI’s first LTA Signature Augmentation and Validation Plugtests™ has seen international participants exchange over 35 000 digital signature validation reports.
Held from 23 October - 22 December 2023, the remote interoperability event was organized by the ETSI Centre for Testing and Interoperability (CTI), on behalf of ETSI’s Technical Committee for Electronic Signatures and Trust Infrastructures (TC ESI). This Plugtests™ event was facilitated with the support and co-funding of the European Commission (EC) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
Conducted using a dedicated web portal, sessions over the month-long Plugtests™ attracted the involvement of 190 participants from 121 organizations across 38 countries.
Sharing intelligence: ETSI AI Conference highlights role of standardization in supporting ICT industry transformation.
Held at ETSI’s Sophia Antipolis headquarters from 5-7 February, the event welcomed close to 200 participants from 25+ countries, with featured speakers including AI experts from government agencies, standards bodies, academia and industry.
Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) technologies are enabling disruptive new applications across a wide range of digital products and services. Reviewing the current status of AI developments worldwide, the Conference explored the role of standardization in ETSI and other SDOs to support the development of a robust market for safe, lawful AI applications and services within the framework of European policymaking.
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has published a significant new technical report, "ETSI TR 103 936 V1.1.1 (2024-01): Cyber Security; Implementing Design Practices to Mitigate Consumer IoT-Enabled Coercive Control". This pioneering document addresses the increasingly important issue of safeguarding individuals from coercive control through the misuse of consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Coercive control encompasses a range of abusive acts such as security breaches, privacy invasions, harassment, physical assault, and other patterns of behaviour that can limit autonomy or cause emotional harm to potential targets.
In a significant step highlighting the critical importance of security for mobile device users, the French National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) has certified ETSI's Consumer Mobile Device Protection Profile under the Common Criteria global certification framework. This represents the first certification by a national administration of a comprehensive suite of specifications for assessing the security of smartphones.
Sophia Antipolis, 02 January 2024
*This article was updated with additional details on January 4, 2024.
All at ETSI are saddened to hear of the passing on December 9, 2023 of one of the great early champions of European mobile communications. Thomas Haug made a massive contribution to the work that led to the creation of ETSI in 1988, as one of the leaders in the Nordic project for cellular communication (NMT) and Chair of the CEPT* GSM group.
