The IMTC Annual meeting will be held on Wednesday, November 3, from 10:00 – 13:00 PST (Pacific).
The meeting is open for everyone to connect via Scopia Desktop Client/H323 Video-Conferencing Device/Phone Dial-in.

In the meeting we will be reviewing IMTC activities, both 2010 and a look at 2011 plans.
In addition, we have a great panel presentation entitled, ‘Future of Video’ with speakers from IMTC, UCIF and SIP Forum.

Speakers include: Anatoli Levin (Radvision/IMTC President), Kfir Pravda (IMTC VP Marketing), Joe Sigrist (Avaya), Patrick Luthi (Tandberg-Cisco), Paul Ritchie (Global Inventures), Charles Eckel (Cisco), Ari Heikkinen (PV), Farid Benamrouche (NXP), Albert Wong (Dilithium Networks), Stephen Botzko (Polycom), Allyn Romanow (Cisco), David Benham (Cisco), Sumit Kumar (AT&T), Andrea Basso (AT&T Labs).

The meeting will be via telepresense and conference bridge information is outlined below:

Desktop Link:

To connect from your desktop, go to http://www.tryscopia.com/scopia?ID=51876&autojoin

For other options (including connecting with presentation only or watching the webcast), go to http://www.tryscopia.com/scopia?ID=51876

We recommend you install the desktop client beforehand. To install the client, go to http://www.tryscopia.com/scopia?client

H.323 dial-in: To connect from a video-conferencing device, dial 65.51.241.196

Phone dial-in: To connect from a phone, please dial 201-773-7100 and enter 51876

We look forward to your participation.

Best Regards, Paul

IMTC Executive Director

Packet Switched Streaming Activity Group is a part of the IMTC testing groups, consists of over 20 companies and helping interoperability happen in the PSS field.

We asked the PSS chairs, Farid Benamrouche and Ari Heikkinen to talk about the PSS group activities:

First, what is the PSS activity group?

The abbreviation stands for Packet Switched Streaming Services Activity Group.
The main focus in PSS AG has been testing the 3GPP PSS specifications from release 4 to release 9.

In general the functionalities to test are based on member companies’ needs and wishes, as expressed through group discussion and consensus. In addition to basic streaming the recent testing activities have focused to features like HSPDA, rate adaptation, NAT/Firewall traversal, and fast content switching. The group is not limited to testing 3GPP specifications – for example, one feature which has raised interest in the group has been HTTP streaming according to the IETF draft submitted by Apple; the group developed a test specification and began testing this feature in March 2010.
Also the new 3GPP HTTP streaming specification is clearly one of the features to be tested in near future.

We have 21 members within the group including both server and client companies, and 10-12 of the companies contribute actively to regular calls and testing events. PSS AG gives direct feedback to 3GPP and other relevant SDO’s (e.g. IETF) for clarifications/modifications based on the experiments within the group.

* What does your activity group offer to companies in the PSS field?

First of all, participation in PSS Activity Group and in IMTC activities in general is an excellent way to simply improve your company’s product by finding and fixing possible interoperability issues early. This also helps reducing the time to market for new features deployment. We have an advanced web tracking tool based on test documents which manages test results and provides this information in report format directly to the relevant engineers. Besides face-to-face and virtual testing events remote testing is possible on a continuous basis.

PSS AG membership also enables early involvement on testing and deployment of emerging new standards with other leaders and experts in the industry. From the expert technical discussion within PSS-AG, one can for instance get easily answers to problematic issues which the engineers may be facing.

Active PSS AG participation also serves as de-facto proof for interoperability which is certainly recognized by potential customers.

* What is the role of the group chairmen?

I would say that the main role is facilitating the activities in different areas like hosting conference calls, collecting feedback in general, coordinating test case creation and feature planning, liasons for SDOs, provision of needed tools for testing, planning the events etc.  So you could say that the group chairmen are to help the member companies’ to fulfill their common (and individual) needs.

One part of the work is also to represent the group to external parties as well as towards the IMTC organization.

* What are the group greatest achievements to date?

PSS-AG had a significant role in facilitating deployment of the original 3GPP PSS based media services, and it continues to facilitate deployment of new features today. This success has significantly increased the group of member companies participating in tests. The PSS AG has a liaison relationship with different SDOs, and liaisons have been posted regularly on our testing experience. Such liaisons often result in the SDO’s accepting PSS-AG feedback and making changes and improvements to the specifications.

* What are the major goals for 2010?

Naturally we continuously want to keep PSS AG as an interesting and growing forum for interoperability testing, and via that to enable the industry wide deployment of PSS related features and applications.   At concrete level the upcoming SuperOP event in June will be the main event of the year, where all basically all features having a PSS test specification can be tested onsite. Feature wise, http streaming from Apple and 3GPP will be perhaps the most significant new features to be tested (or a test spec to be created) this year.
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Farid Benamrouche is currently Project Manager of the R&D streaming solutions at NXP Software. He is an expert on wireless streaming protocols ranging from 3G to Bluetooth and various multimedia technologies. Farid is currently Co-Chairman of the Packet Switched Stream (PSS) activity group in International Telecommunications Consortium and was before that actively contributing to the Bluetooth SIG interoperability.

NXP Software is an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) with local sales and support in eight countries, and has established partnerships with key vendors to ensure optimum flexibility, ease-of-integration and interoperability between HW and SW platforms. Their software is supporting customers to translate their innovative ideas into consumer lifestyle experiences that truly stand out from the crowd.

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Ari Heikkinen is Director of Programs in PV Finland. Before joining PV in 2007 he worked in various research and management positions in Nokia from 1995 to 2007. Dr. Heikkinen received a Ph.D. in Signal Processing in Tampere University of Technology in 2002. He has several publications and holds 5 patents. In his current role he manages several customer programs related to multimedia communications systems and services. Dr. Heikkinen acts as a co-chair for Packet Switched Streaming (PSS) Activity Group in International Telecommunications Consortium.

PacketVideo (PV) is recognized and awarded pioneer in creating and innovating various multimedia software solutions for both mobiles and connected home devices. PV’s software powers the world’s leading mobile entertainment services and has shipped in over 300 million units worldwide in hundreds of different handsets and CE devices. PV is a US based company with headquarters in San Diego, California. European research and development offices are located in Germany, Switzerland and Finland.

April 26-30, 2010 – IMTC SuperOp! 2010,  IMTC premier annual Interoperability Testing event, will take place in Jesi (Ancona), Italy. During the event, IMTC members will get together to test various IP Video communications technologies, including Video-Conferencing over SIP and H.323, Packet Switch Streaming, 3G-324M mobile video-conferencing and more. Additionally, IMTC will held a Telepresence Interoperability workshop and kick-off meeting. The event is open to all IMTC members and non-members by invitation only. Additional information can be found at the registration site.

Update, the event is postponed to June 14-18:

” Dear Colleagues,

It is not an easy decision to make, but considering that the world just started very gradual recovery from the ash cloud travel disruption, IMTC SuperOp! Planning Committee decided that it will be reasonable and prudent to postpone the testing event until June 14-18. We truly believe that this is the best decision on behalf of all participants, as it will ensure that everybody will be able to safely get in and out of the event and will be able to focus on the testing and not on the travel headaches during the event. Additionally, we see this as an opportunity to may be bring additional companies to the event, especially those who couldn’t attend next week.

With this, there is a number of items to be taken care of:

1. To simplify the logistics, all attendees will be automatically rebooked with the hotel according to the new event dates (June 14 – 18). For example, for someone who was supposed to arrive on Sunday, April 25^th, the new arrival date with the hotel will be June 13. Of course the changes can be made as necessary by individual participants.
2. We are working on making the arrangements with the hotel to securely store all of the shipped equipment at no charge. Update will be provided on this later on.
3. We would like to encourage everyone to make new travel arrangements as soon as possible to ensure proper flights will be available.

Once again, we believe that this is the best decision for all the participants and IMTC members under current circumstances and we apologize for any inconvenience.

With best regards,

IMTC SuperOp! Planning Committee ”

It gives me great pleasure to announce the formation of a Telepresence Multi-Streaming Activity Group at IMTC. Telepresence is becoming widely deployed as companies seek a premium user experience while working together across different locations. Several IMTC members, including Cisco, Polycom, Radvision, Lifesize, Tandberg and AT&T have expressed interest in a Telepresence Activity Group and will be actively participating in the AG. The AG will be co-chaired by Allyn Romanow of Cisco and a representative from Polycom.

The charter of the AG will be to define the requirements and use cases to drive standardization efforts by the SDOs (Standards Development Organizations) in the Telepresence Multi-Streaming area. The AG will work closely with its peers in IETF and ITU-T. The kickoff meeting will be during SuperOp in April at Ancona, during the Telepresence Workshop.

The Board of Directors would like to invite all members to actively participate in the kickoff and the AG, as IMTC leads the way in standardizing another emerging technology area.

Shantanu Sarkar
Working Group Chair, Unified Communications
IMTC

One of the important aspects of an open standard is the ability to rigorously test it for interoperability. And then when you’re done testing – test yet again. It is an ongoing process that never seem to end.

Take our 3G-324M AG at the IMTC – I’ve been an active participant of this group from its inception, and that was over 5 years ago. And this year, the 3G-324M AG is going to have some more testing done – it seems like there is no rest for engineers.

So now that the GSMA has decided to go full force and work on the VoLTE specification so that operators can start rolling out all-IP mobile networks and still provide the basic services they do today, there was a missing piece in the puzzle – they have the ecosystem, but not real place to use for interoperability testing amongst the vendors implementing VoLTE.

That’s exactly where the IMTC comes into the picture – the IMTC is a place where interoperability testing of multimedia specifications is done. And we’re doing it for VoLTE as well – it’s what the IMTC IMS AG is doing these days.

We have a tentative plan moving forward, that I’d like to share with you here:

• Host 4 interoperability testing events in 2010 (1 down, 3 to go), roughly one in each quarter.
• Publish the first test specification document for VoLTE by June 2010.

The test events themselves are relatively straight forward – companies volunteer to host the event and other vendors within the IMS AG gather for testing.

The test specification document is where the real effort is made – we plan to align the specification between companies by publishing a thorough test specification document which can be used by QA teams within vendor companies and by service providers before going to market with their VoLTE products.

There’s a lot of work ahead of us, but as the IMTC has done this in the past, I am sure we will be able to do it again.