ALLENTOWN, Pa. -- The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI) organizations accepted Agere Systems (NYSE: AGR.A, AGR.B) technology proposals for creating a new standard that will help enable enhanced telecommunications services and spawn new business models for next generation converged multimedia networks.

The ITU and ANSI create standards telecom carriers and equipment providers are encouraged to follow. Both the ITU’s NGN (Next Generation Networks) Focus Group, as well as the ANSI T1S1 and T1A1 standards group, accepted Agere’s proposals to be included as NGN requirements.

Lucent, Nortel, NTT, and Sprint officials chaired the ITU standards group that accepted Agere’s proposals. Agere is also working with AT&T, Cisco, and Nortel to refine the proposals in preparation for the ITU’s meetings in late November at which decisions regarding specifications of the NGN standard will be set by the companies named in this announcement, along with several others.

This proposal acceptance mean telecom service providers can offer new per-service and multi-tiered service guarantees to their customers; create new revenue streams; minimize capital expenses; use network resources more efficiently; reduce system operating costs; improve network performance; and accelerate restoration times of network outages.

Both standards groups accepted Agere’s proposals that an Application Service Resiliency (ASR) mechanism be used as a fundamental and supportive requirement and attribute for developing the NGN. ASR is the measurable attribute or characteristic for maintaining application service continuity regardless of any underlying failure conditions of the communications network.

ASR capability is particularly valuable for mission-critical and highly delay-sensitive services such as voice over Internet protocol (VOIP--phone calls over IP networks and/or the Internet); streaming video; advanced multimedia services; database transactions; and e-commerce applications where business and residential subscribers often place a high value on service quality and service continuity.

Agere Systems has long been active in developing innovations for enhancing converged network performance – as evidenced by their most recent technology demonstration of Unbreakable Access™ at this year’s SUPERCOMM show in Chicago. Agere showed at that event the concept of live, per-service ASR and quality of service capability made possible by a new generation of equipment driven by its flagship APP550 intelligent network processing engine. This engine leverages Agere’s number one worldwide ranking in sales of traffic management devices.

“The world is moving rapidly toward delivery of billable multimedia services that operators deliver over a single converged network,” said Samir Samhouri, vice president of Agere Systems. “To drive this business model, technologies such as ASR have to exist and proliferate for service providers to detect, protect, and direct service flows and charge appropriately for them.

“Existing mechanisms have made network protection an all-or-nothing proposition,” added Samhouri. “It was not possible to protect only selected traffic flows at the granularity of an individual service. Given the multiple tiers of services that will exist in next generation networks, such approaches prove to be too inefficient and inflexible. ASR, enabled by Agere’s network processors, is aimed directly at solving this problem. This ASR technology allows telecom carriers to offer services that treat resiliency in a radically new way: as a dynamically adjustable parameter that can be tuned to the customers’ requirements and billed accordingly.”

Agere Systems Inc.