Background
Within ETSI the standardization of the Dynamic synchronous Transfer Mode (DTM) technology is underway. This new synchronous transport network technology is able to carry multiple services at different data rates at the same time.
The technology originally results from work done within Ellemtel, was further developed at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and has since been refined by Net Insight. The goal of standardization is to bring the fruits of this development effort into the realm of ETSI standards.
The DTM technology provides dynamic channel establishment, dynamic capacity adjustment over isochronous channels using simple and predictable switching mechanisms while achieving high capacity, low arrival jitter, high capacity Quality of Service at a low cost. It is able to deliver a multi-service transport service with scalability into the future.

Why Standardisation?
The main reason for defining a standard for something is to make life convenient and inexpensive for a buyer of this something. Batteries and light bulbs are good examples of working standards. In these cases they provide smooth interworking between products from different vendors, e.g. the batteries in your Walkman are most likely manufactured by a company other than Sony and would also work perfectly well in a similar product from another company.
Other benefits for the customer are of course accessibility and price. You can go into any store and find a suitable battery and most likely you can find several competing brands, some try to sell the product based on performance arguments, while others use the pricing.
It is however not only the customers that benefit from the standard, the market for a particular battery does of course increase manifold if it can be plugged into almost any kind of electrical appliance. Without the standard it might even be impossible, or at least much more difficult, for third party manufacturers to be able to provide competitive products.
Exactly the same motivations are valid when talking about data and telecommunications standards, but in this industry the interworking aspects are even more central as the whole issue is about communication between two parties that must understand each other. Without standards in this area, both the international telephony network and the Internet would basically be impossible unless all equipment were provided by one organization.

What is a Telecom Standard?
The simple answer to this is a set of documents describing how two or more boxes should interface and talk to each other. This could be a description of what physical cable connectors are supposed to look like or what content the messages between the control systems of the boxes should be in different situations. A new standard does not have to describe all of these aspects but can usually refer to already existing standards or leave room for certain aspects to be handled by other coming standards. A good example of this is the Internet Protocol. The basic standard does not say anything about which type of equipment that should be used for transmission of the data. Instead other standards have been produced describing specifically how technologies such as Ethernet, SDH/SONET and now DTM, should be used for carrying for example IP traffic.
Another important aspect of most telecom standards is that they concentrate on the interworking aspects and usually don't say much about how the implementation should be done on either side of the interface. As long as a technology is powerful enough to fulfill the required characteristics of a standard, the implementation is not important.
This aspect allows DTM to interwork with most other transmission technologies. In the SDH/SONET case it is for example possible to both carry DTM traffic over a SDH/SONET network and also to do the opposite - carry traffic between two SDH/SONET interfaces across a DTM network. In this case the existing standard thus allow equipment implementing a new technology to interwork with equipment from other vendors even before the complete standard for the new technology is in place!

Who approves a standard?
As standards are a basis for promoting competition on a free market, especially for modern complex products, most states support a number of standardization organizations. However, in order to gain momentum and acceptance for a new technology, it is nowadays also common that large companies within the telecom sector co-operate in forums to bring standards to the market, this is for example the case for the ATM technology.
In the telecommunications industry there are currently a few large standardization organizations that dominate. One of these is the ITU-T, which is organized by the United Nations. It is common that standards that have been produced by other organizations also are adopted by the ITU-T to produce a true global "world standard". Otherwise, the European ETSI and the US ANSI and IEEE together with IETF for IP specific questions dominate in producing major standards.
In ETSI, the members are not countries, as in the ITU-T, but rather commercial manufacturers and operators together with a few non-commercial institutes. The members do the actual approval of a standard. The standard organization will usually have some formal procedure with a number of steps that must be passed before the standard is considered approved. Often a suggested standard can pass these steps with consensus or near consensus from the members (after some work), but formal voting procedures are also implemented to resolve disputes.

New progress in the standardisation of DTM
Already when the company was started, the intention from Net Insight was to, at some time take DTM into a formal standard. No time-frame for this was however set by then, rather it was a secondary goal that was to be accomplished when formal specifications and external interest was up to level that made the effort worthwhile.
In April 1999, the interest in the Nordic countries had risen to a level where some large telecom operators (Finnet Group, TeleNor and Tele Danmark) were ready to support the standardization together with Net Insight. According to the ETSI rules, four supporting members are required within the ETSI framework to create new standardization work items, and as this was fulfilled, the DTM technology was added to the list of ETSI standardization items.
Further work within ETSI has then resulted in that the complete standard has been divided into sixteen work-items. Each work-item is expected to result in a deliverable, thus resulting in a standard document. Further, these work items are handled in two different working groups, SPAN 13 (Services and Protocols for Advanced Networks) and TM1 (Transmission and Multiplexing).
Most parts are handled in SPAN 13 while some parts concerning the physical interfaces are dealt with in TM1. As of today the most necessary work items required for the creation of a standard are formally in place within ETSI!
Much work remains, but the process shows progress.
Part 1 (The system description) was published as a standard in March 2002. As of October 2000 many large service operators and manufacturers have been added to the list of supporters. Thus, Telekom Austria, BAE, Allied Telesyn, Telia, Tele2, Finnet Group, TeleNor and Tele Danmark are currently supporting the standardisation together with Net Insight.
Part 2 is the largest part and is divided into three work-items, where the first work-item is currently in voting and should be completed in October 2002.
Part 3 and 4 describes physical interfaces for DTM up to 40 Gbps. These are currently in voting and are expected to be published January 2003.

These four parts form the base for the DTM technology and will together be enough for other manufacturers to build compatible DTM networking equipment. In addition, part 7, Ethernet over DTM, was published in May 2002. The standardization will however continue long after this first step has been taken with feature additions, adjustments and interworking options. Compare with GSM, which was started towards the end of the 80's and still is going on with almost the same intensity, meanwhile it certainly has produced a number of usable products from different vendors. The large number of work-items within the standard are much due to the extensive interworking with other technologies that are defined for DTM.
Within Net Insight; interworking, compatibility and future improvement have been lead stars in the research and development from the beginning and this is now also reflected in the standard, at the cost of a larger number of work-items. This is however a reasonable price to pay in order to more easily get the technology out to complement and strengthen existing transmission network infrastructures. Full compatibility with existing infrastructure is and will continue to be a lead star in Net Insight's products.

IPR portfolio
A natural part of standardization is to identify the IPR relating to the technology being essential for any form of implementation of that standard. ETSI, as any other standard body, has IPR rules that states that IPR essential for implementation of a standard must be reported to ETSI so that it can be made available under "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms". Net Insight has committed itself to follow the ETSI IPR rules and work is under way to ensure that those patents so required will be available under the ETSI IPR conditions. This does not necessarily make IPR available for free, but it makes it feasible for other vendors to also implement a standard.

ETSI and the ITU-T strengthen their co-operation
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to enhance their co-operation in the development of telecommunications standards. This memorandum will help to strengthen their co-operation and also ensure the development of appropriate standards.
In practice this memorandum ensures that ETSI standards can be endorsed by ITU-T. The MoU provides the basis for common maintenance of standards common to both ETSI and ITU-T. From a DTM standpoint, this tightened co-operation aids in providing a smooth path for the DTM standard to be eventually adopted by ITU-T.
For more information: www.etsi.org