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The Permanent Consultative Committee I of CITEL will begin today in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with all the work done by each group reorganized in four areas: Technology (GTT), Considerations on Regulations and Policies (GTPR), Network Operations and Services (GTORPS) and Regional Telecommunication Developments (GTD). CITEL, entity of the Organization of American States (OAS), will analyze, among it most highlighted proposals, “the Survey on broadband necessities 2007-2010”, presented by the GTORPS Group.

The initiative’s objective is so regulators of the region get to know which operators are offering, or are about to offer VoIP services to the market and their interconnection strategies with networks of the region, fso that regulating entities of each country will be able to supervise and control the execution of interconnection and interoperability standards established by the CITEL, just like agreements of quality standards signed among international operators.

Just like it was debated during CCPs IX reunion, the deployment of Next Generation Networks (NGN) continues supporting the “upgrade” of existing cables, however it will not be possible to transfer the regulation of networks based on circuits to networks based on IP. Furthermore, we have been experiencing a growth in the demand of broadband due to a sales increase of DSL services, mainly ADSL, improvements in IPTV standards, an increase in quantity and variety of contents, government efforts to impel the Digital Government and strong competition in the distribution of voice, data and video contents. As a result, a lack of infrastructure throughout the region to satisfy and assure bandwidths that will be demanded in the short term (2007-2010), according to the estimated growth, is foreseen.

In this sense, the GTORPS group considers that all type of network interconnection and interoperability, especially convergent networks, in compliance to UITs standards, should be impelled. Therefore, CITEL should impel regulators to take actions for the technical execution of international interoperability on behalf of operators relating to signaling, synchronization, transmission, numeration, routing, emergency services, as well as characteristics of network performance, service quality and billing.