Chapter 2. Standards

Standards are documents containing agreements reached by standards bodies responsible for that particular area of telecommunications. They are the result of study, discussion, and analysis. Standards may be endorsed at different levels—company, national, regional, and international—as appropriate. This chapter provides an overview of the organizations that set Signaling System No. 7 (SS7) standards at the national, regional, and international levels.

The standards process works through agreement among relevant experts from across a spectrum of private and public sectors. These experts debate, contribute views, and investigate, often with a multitiered political backdrop, to arrive at an agreed-upon specification. The process of getting a consensus from different experts after working through the technical issues almost always leads to a better specification in comparison to one developed by a single vendor or government department. A consensus-based specification takes longer to produce than a single-party specification approach because of the time-consuming nature of multiparty discussions. Although the process might be somewhat slower, it leads to a superior specification that will be supported by a wide base of manufacturers—bringing with it interoperability.

The fact that Internet, wireless, and fixed-line standards are all being addressed by the SS7/C7 standards bodies is a sign of the central role that SS7/C7 plays in the convergence of today's voice and data networks. Until the early 1990s, largely separate worlds existed for telecommunications standards and for Internet standards. These two worlds are now intersecting, creating the need for additional standards to address new architectures, protocols, and features.

Test specifications are used to facilitate the standards process by helping validate that equipment conforms to the documented standard(s). Testing is normally performed by an independent organization. Quite often this happens to be a department of an incumbent or private company that has been spun off. C7/SS7 testing is discussed in Chapter 16, "SS7 Testing."

This chapter begins with a historical outline of the development of international telephony standards. It then details the standards bodies, beginning at the international level, moving into the regional level, and finishing at the national level.