Beijing, China, 31 August 2010


The Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) of South Korea and ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, today announced the renewal of their Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). This renewal confirms the willingness of two major standards development organizations to continue to share their work and expertise in order to contribute to the development of globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).
The new undertaking was signed during the Global Standards Collaboration meeting in Beijing, an annual gathering of senior representatives of the world's leading ICT standards organizations.

The original MoU between TTA, the Korean ICT standardization association, and ETSI was established in 1992 as a commitment by the two organizations to support the common development of open and harmonized ICT standards. The agreement was last renewed in 2005.

TTA and ETSI have many common areas where the work of the two organizations intersects at the point where specifications and standards development come together. The agreement ensures a high level of alignment between the two organizations and their respective regions. In the foreseen life span of the new MoU, TTA and ETSI and their respective secretariats will work together to further stimulate collaboration on identified technical areas with a global impact. These include Intelligent Transport Systems, the fast growing sector of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications and Digital Multimedia Broadcasting.

 "While reviewing the text of the MoU, TTA recognized that ETSI and TTA are covering more areas where there is scope for co-operation, including mobile communication aspects such as IMT-Advanced and 3GPP, and next generation networks such as M2M, Intelligent Transport Systems, Cloud Computing and TETRA. I believe these areas are essential for both organizations and certainly ones where we can be the international standardization leaders" said Keun Hyeob Lee, the TTA President. "I look forward to this traditional co-operative relationship continuing into the coming years and I sincerely trust that both organizations will continue to prosper in the future".

ETSI's Director-General, Walter Weigel, remarked, 'ETSI is committed to ensuring global collaboration with all the important standardization organizations of the world. TTA is unquestionably one of our long-standing partners with whom we have collaborated very effectively in the past, especially in the big success story of 3GPP. I am therefore delighted by the renewal of the MoU with TTA and I am confident that this collaboration will lead to many benefits for the development of ICT standards with worldwide impact.'

As TTA and ETSI enlarge the scope of their work by committing resources to new and emerging ICT standards activities, this partnership will also enable the two organizations to exchange information about each other's work programmes and thus to better co-ordinate their future endeavours.

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Notes for Editors

About TTA
The purpose of TTA is to contribute to the advancement of technology and the promotion of information and telecommunications services and industry as well as the development of national economy, by effectively establishing and providing technical standards that reflect the latest domestic and international technological advances, needed for the planning, design and operation of global end-to-end telecommunications and related information services, in close collaboration with companies, organizations and groups concerned with information and telecommunications such as network operators, service providers, equipment manufacturers, academia, R&D institutes, etc.
For more information, please visit: http://www.tta.or.kr/eng/ 


About ETSI
ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, aeronautical, broadcast and internet technologies and is officially recognized by the European Union as a European Standards Organization.  ETSI is an independent, not-for-profit association whose 740 member companies and organizations, drawn from 62 countries across 5 continents worldwide, determine the ETSI work programme and participate directly in its work. 

ETSI's complementary standards-enabling service (Interopolis and Forapolis) offer "Idea to Product" solutions.  Interopolis provides testing methodology expertise, including interoperability test events. Forapolis provides a full range of support and management services to associations and fora.
For further information, please visit www.etsi.org


TTA press contact:

For ETSI press enquiries:

Director
Sung-Gwun KIM
External Relations Team, General Service Department, TTA
Tel: +82-31-724-0050
Email: skkim@tta.or.kr


Paul Reid
Events and Communications, ETSI 
Tel. +33 4 92 94 42 19
E-mail: Paul.Reid@etsi.org