ETSI

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI, English: European Telecommunications Standards Institute ) is one of the three major standards organizations in Europe with headquarters in Sophia Antipolis near Nice (France). ETSI is a non-profit organization that is officially recognized by the European Union as a European Standards Organisation and aims to create applicable standards for Information and communication technologies in the world.

History

The institute was founded in 1988 on the initiative of the European Commission and has in 2012 a total of 700 members from over 60 countries, including network operators, service providers, administrations, users and manufacturers. It emerged from the Conférence Européenne des Administrations des Postes et des Télécommunications (CEPT ), in which the former European telecommunications administrations ( at monopoly times, today the national regulatory authorities ) had joined forces to clarify organizational and technical issues. After the founding of the ETSI technical issues were transferred to her, CEPT deals today only with issues of spectrum management and regulation.

In 2005, the budget was in excess of 20 million euros and consisted of membership fees, income from commercial activities, subsidies, of whom 10% come from the European Community.

Tasks

ETSI is responsible for European standardization in the field of telecommunications. Together with the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and the European Committee for Standardization ( CEN) is ETSI, the European system for technical standards. According to its membership structure, the operation of the Institute is demand-driven, that is, it develops standards and norms according to the needs of its members - in contrast to his organized as authority predecessor organization, the rules aufstellte to which the undertakings concerned had to keep. There must be at least four members to apply for a so-called " Work Item " for the creation of a new standard.

Important standards that were created by the ETSI, or where she has been involved in ITU- frame, are, for example, DSS1, GSM, UMTS, Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT), SDR and GMR ( satellite telephony ), Terrestrial Trunked Radio ( TETRA) and Next Generation Network ( NGN).

For the standardization of UMTS and the evolution of GSM ETSI has teamed up with five other standardization bodies to worldwide 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP ).

Furthermore, ETSI has employed his technical committee " Lawful Interception" monitoring standards to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access the telecommunications of citizens. Critics complain as Constanze Kurz, that uncertainties in computer systems would be installed by this monitoring interfaces which had already been exploited repeatedly for economic espionage and could jeopardize the fundamental rights and civil rights.