M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Potential ITU Work Items in Electronic Commerce Mostafa Hashem Sherif AT&T * (These are personal opinions and do not engage AT&T )

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Overview Review of ITU Core Competencies Areas of Electronic Commerce to be discussed – Business to Business – Business to Consumer (4 applications) – Person to Person Summary of Suggested ITU Work Items

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Starting Position Electronic commerce covers dematerialized relations among economic agents No single standards organization can resolve all the problems facing electronic commerce ITU efforts build on and complement on-going work in other standard organizations ITU successes have been in the area of telecommunications infrastructure

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April ITU Core Competencies Interoperability of transmission and switching equipment world-wide Simple terminal interface for technologically unsophisticated users Operations, administration and settlement across operators Quality of service and performance management including accounting and billing

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Business to Business Electronic Commerce (example: Automotive Network Exchange (ANX)) Trading Partner (TP) Trading Partner (TP) ANX Overseer

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Problems Uncovered Incompatibility of certificates Encryption is costly for SME Distributed management of a VPN is difficult – configuration management – performance management – fault management and trouble ticketing User cannot easily collect information on performance

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Infrastructure Provider (s) Content Provider Service Provider End-user or Customer Network Provider 1Network Provider 2 Content Manager (Retailer, broker, etc..) Analysis in Terms of the Emerging Model for Telecommunications Services

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Distributed Management in a Virtual Private Network Network Provider 1 Network Provider 2 Network Provider 3 Performance data archiver 3 Performance data archiver 1 Performance data archiver 2 Performance data collector (Customer site 1) Performance data collector (Customer site 2) Performance data collector (Customer site 3) (X.160, X.161, X.162) are for a network run by a single operator

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Extending the Information Boundaries Across Administrative Domains Existing: – Exchange of trouble tickets using X.790, X.791(EURESCOM projects for private lines) – Accounting Data Interchange Format (IETF/ETSI TIPHON) Needed: – Networks using frame relay, ATM to transport IP traffic – DWDM and optical networks

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Some Issues for Business to Consumer Electronic Commerce User interfaces and their ergonomics Ease and uniformity of transactions on a world-wide (as for telephone calls) Accuracy of microbilling and capability to verify and contest the billing accuracy Multiple channels to merchant sites (text, audio, image, etc.) Payment in the buyer's currency Identification with biometrics Use of telephone cards (ubiquity, accuracy)

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Application 1: The Minitel Model and its Reincarnations Network of users and merchants federated by the operator or network provider (intermediary) Each operator identifies and authenticates its subscribers and federated merchants or content providers Operator may also collect the payment and payback the suppliers after getting its commission NTT DoCoMo with i-Mode for mobile networks Telia for wireline operations ISP's are also getting involved

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Evaluation Advantages – ease of identification and authentication – useful for small amounts – no need to introduce new means of payment Disadvantages – proprietary protocols (merchants and buyers must have the same operator) – limited to a single currency

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Possible ITU Work Items for Application 1 Ensure world-wide usage by removing currency dependency – use of "minutes on the network" as an exchange currency for micropayments – Latch on settlement agreement among telephone operators – Each operator identifies and authenticates their subscribers – this would be also a cost-effective solution (banks do not have a network going to individual homes to offer an economical solution)

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Application 2: Pre-paid telephone cards Prepaid telephone card are widely used Many operators with non compatible cards Accuracy of accounting is questionable for small operators This may be a hindrance to the use of the "minutes on the network" as a universal microcurrency ITU work items may address some of the issues

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April ITU Work Items for Application 2 Multi-application cards can also include telephone cards payment Two competing operating systems – Multos ( Mondex and MasterCard) – JavaSoft (Sun et Visa) Which one is more suitable for micropayment applications for telephone and the Internet? ITU Recommendations may be needed application 1 application n virtual machine Integrated Circuit Card Operating System Integrated Circuit Card application

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Application 3: Biometric Identification Acquired characteristics – Handwritten signature ( octets) – Voice print ( octets): Bacob with technology from Keyware Technologies ( – Keystroke dynamics Innate characteristics – Photo image ( octets) – Fingerprint ( octets) – Iris scan (256 octets) – Retina (35 octets) – Shape of the hand (9 octets)

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Biometric Revenues* Total revenue: – $58.4 K in 99/est. $110 K in 00 – $ 7K in 99 /est. $14K in 00 for financial applications Techniques – digital finger prints 34% – hand geometry 26% – face recognition 15% (check cashing/gambling casinos) – iris/retinal recognition 11% – speaker recognition 11% – signature recognition 3% * excluding automatic systems for finger prints used by governments - Source International Biometric Group

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Possible ITU Work items for Application 3 Criteria for evaluation of vocal identification systems (performance with call quality, resistance to attacks, etc.) Reference data for algorithm development Standard format for file storage, etc. Other players – Association for Biometrics ( – IBIA (International Biometric Industry Association) ( – Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationtechnik (BSI – Federal Information Security Agency) (

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Application 4: Multimedia connection of a User to a Call Center Voice and data interactions are simultaneously needed: – Complex transactions – Verification of user's identity before payment approval PSTN will be used for voice calls for sometime Needed: – a way to multiplex voice and data calls on the same subscriber line (on xDSL) – a method to account for possible ways for connecting the PSTN to IP networks (see TIPHON project of ETSI)

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Person-to-Person Payments Internet auctions revealed the need for a trusted third party for one-line transactions among complete strangers Examples: PayPal.com, eMoneyMail Systems require subscription to open accounts Telephone companies are well positioned to extend the service to – multiple countries – a more open network (e.g., multiple operators) ITU Recommendations are needed for architecture and performance characterization

M. H. SherifITU Mediacom April Summary of Suggested ITU Work Items Business to Business – Exchange of performance and fault management information across administrative domains Business to Consumer – Universal method for micropayments latching to telephony settlements – Telephone cards: accuracy and interoperability – Identification with speech – Traffic Multiplexing Person to Person – Focus on on-line auctions