TABLE OF CONTENTS Tracy Dupree,
DDK Communications, LLC
Dr. Stephen J. Trowbridge,
Lucent Technologies - Bell Laboratories
Throughout the evolution of technology, there has been a need for industry standards. On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sent his first message over a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. By a decade later, telegraphy service was available to the general public. But with the initial deployment of this technology, telegraph lines did not cross national borders, and each country used a different system. This created the need for messages to be transcribed, translated, and handed over at frontiers, where they would then be retransmitted over the telegraph network of the neighboring country.
After the initial attempts to interconnect systems according to numerous bilateral and regional agreements, 20 founding Member States agreed to form the International Telegraph Union (ITU) on May 17, 1865, in Paris. This organization is a direct ancestor of today's International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is still central to the creation of many communication standards today.
Since that time, many different types of organizations have evolved to develop industry standards, including
Large, intergovernmental or treaty based organizations such as ITU
Large, nongovernmental international organizations based on national membership including the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Members of these organizations are the designated National Standards Organizations for each country
Regional Standards Oganizations, such as the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) and the...
