Multiservice Switching Forum Meets

FREMONT, Calif. -- The Multiservice Switching Forum (MSF) held its year-end meeting in Osaka, Japan, marking the first time that the Forum has met in Asia. During the working meeting, representatives from major global carrier and vendor companies made progress on MSF's technical work and developed roadmaps for the Forum's efforts in 2002. The keynote speaker, Dr. Kazou Imai, vice president and general manager of NTT DoCoMo's Network Laboratories, shared his vision of mobile networks in a future dominated by a converged networking environment. This vision was presented in an entertaining futuristic view of mobile services in the year 2010. Dr. Imai noted that in order to enable advanced services an intelligence layer would be required on top of the network transport infrastructure. He praised the work of the MSF in providing an open architecture for multiservice network solutions with clear separation of transport, control and application planes. "This meeting was a fantastic end to an unforgettable year," said Roger Ward, president of MSF. "Dr. Imai has a great vision for where our industry is going and how the MSF can help lead the way. We plan to build on our work in 2002 and continue to champion the cause of interoperability for multi-technology, multi-vendor architecture framework."Multiservice Switching Forum