Review of NGNI of 15th of February in Brussels

NGNI is a Thematic Network within the IST program. Jens Kristensen, Ericsson is the new project manager since November 2001. He takes turn Latif Ladid, which will be a senior advisor for NGNI, but no more the project manager. NGNI consists of a main core team which includes of Latif Ladid (Ericsson), Stathya Rao (Telscom), Martin Potts (Martel), and Patrick Cocquet (6WIND). The extended team regarding the frameworks are all six project leader (e.g. Kai-Oliver Detken for New Services Group). The overall funding of the project is 2,34 Mio. Euro. The objectives of NGNI are to facilitate NGN evolution through benchmarking, roadmap reports and participation for creating standards.

Building of the European Commission for the review meeting

NGN is also an initiative of IST to promote Next Generation Networks activities in Europe. But there are also partners out of Europe, like Canada and Australia available. Encouraging clustering of activities in the form of thematic working groups involving experts among members. The project will deliver the briefings, benchmark reports, roadmap and facilitate contribution.

Two ways were available of achieving the ambitious objectives (discussion from the first meeting):

The project continued based on the second approach. The "projects" (the EC wants to speak from activities not from projects) of NGNI are:

  1. Internet infrastructure
  2. Network Management
  3. Services

The achievements of the project are till now:

The conclusion was, that the project has delivered results better than expected with all turbulence it had to undergo. The memberships has exceeded the target. The experience gained by the partners is unique since it had to do the job of the Commission in selecting the projects and project consortium and monitoring the progress.

Afterwards the Management Overview has been presented. The main member Alcatel from Belgium wants to withdraw from the project. Siemens wants to stay in the project - but silently. The cost statements of one year will be processed when contract amendment has been done. The management deliverables were not delivered to the European Commission! That is not really critical for the European Commission, but has to be done!

The Future Plans of NGNI are to create a roadmap which should be included the result of top-down visionary approach. Develop visionary scenarios should be involved like broadband IP access to all homes, integration of mobile and fixed networks, and always-on possibilities. The issues of top down approach must be included societal challenges, trends in terminal development, techno-economies, regulation (blurring boundary, …), and environmental (Power consumption, health hazards, …). Mechanisms to reach the objectives should be workshops with invited visionary experts by NGN task forces, scenarios based on the think-tank discussion, and matching the challenges by technical working groups results. This things should result into a consolidated ROADMAP.

The visions consolidation should be start at March 2002. The next member meeting/workshop should take place in October 2002. In conclusion, the reviewers critical comments for NGNI were regarding the missing deliverables, cost statements, and management reports from the core group (Ericsson, Siemens, Telscom, Alcatel, Martel). The positive feedback was available regarding the good work of the activities (projects), which have presented their work during the days before.