Cotonou, Benin, July 2012 Overview of ITU-T Study Group 12 Activities Joachim Pomy, SG 12 Rapporteur Consultant, Opticom GmbH ITU Workshop on “Workshop on Practical measurement of QoS/QoE Parameters for Regulatory Compliance” (Cotonou, Benin, July 2012)

Where it All Begins: Real Communication Situation

... and where Technology comes to Play: Employing a Telecommunication System

SG 12 Mandate ‘Performance, QoS and QoE’ Responsible for Recommendations on performance, quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) for the full spectrum of terminals, networks and services ranging from speech over fixed circuit-based networks to multimedia applications over networks that are mobile and packet based. Included in this scope are the operational aspects of performance, QoS and QoE. A special focus is given to interoperability to ensure end-to-end users' satisfaction. SG 12 is the Lead SG on QoS and Performance

SG 12 Recommendations E.420-E.479, E.800-E.859 G.100-series, except G.160-, G.180- and G.190-series G.1000-series I.350-series (including Y.1501/G.820/I.351), I.371, I.378, I.381 P-series, except P.900-series Y.1220-, Y.1530-, Y.1540-, Y.1560-series

SG 12 Leading Team Chairman Chuck Dvorak (United States) Vice Chairmen Paul Barrett (United Kingdom) Vladimir Efimushkin (Russian Federation) Gamal Amin Elsayed (Sudan) Hyung-Soo Kim (Republic of Korea) Qi Feng (China) Catherine Quinquis (France) Akira Takahashi (Japan) Hassan Talib (Morocco) TSB Support Judit Katona-Kiss, Counsellor Sarah Scott, Assistant

SG 12 Key History Events (1) Established in 1957 Separate SG 16 for Transmission Planning Old SG 12 just did subjective testing & telephone standards At CCITT Plenary Assembly in 1984, these SGs were merged to form the present-day SG 12 During same time SG 12 had a Laboratory WP Subjective & objective testing for loudness of telephones In the CCITT Laboratory in Geneva - closed in 1988 Since 1986 Speech Quality Experts Group (SQEG) To better provide the quality requirements and subjective testing for speech coding algorithms standardized by SG 18 (later SG 15, now SG 16) Key role in the standardization of all of the G.711-G.729 speech and audio codecs, and still exists as Q7/12.

SG 12 Key History Events (2) Since 1997 Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) With a nucleus of subjective and objective video quality expertise from SG12 SG12 still maintains close contact with VQEG Since the early 1990s work in SG 12 has expanded Into many new technology areas ATM VoIP Multimedia Digital wireless IP QoS classes Ethernet IPTV, etc. Network Performance Resource Management. Since 2008 SG12 was given responsibility for Operational aspects of telecommunication network service quality Responsibility for the QoS Development Group (QSDG).

WP Chairmen and Vice Chairmen WP 1 Terminal and multimedia subjective assessment CHAIR: Catherine Quinquis (France) VICE CHAIR: Qi Feng (China) WP 2 Objective models & tools for multimedia quality CHAIR: Klemens Adler (Germany) VICE CHAIR: Paul Barrett (UK) WP 3 Multimedia QoS and QoE CHAIR: Paul Coverdale (China) VICE CHAIR: Akira Takahashi (Japan)

Joint Coordination Activities Accessibility and Human factors (JCA-AHF) Conformance and Interop. Testing (JCA-CIT) Home Networking (JCA-HN) Identity Management (JCA-IdM) IPTV (JC-IPTV) Management (JCA-Mgt.) Network Aspects of Identification Systems (including RFID) (JCA-NID) NGN (JCA-NGN) ICTs and Climate Change (JCA-ICT&CC)

Groups overseen by SG12 CarCom Focus Group Hans Gierlich, Chairman Driver Distraction Focus Group Scott Pennock, Chairman QoS Development Group Luis Cardoso, Chairman Regional Group for Africa Kwame Baah-Acheamfuor, Chairman

CarCom Focus Group In car communication Quality parameters & testing methods Interaction of car hands free systems with radio Requirements on sub-system level Requirements and testing procedures for super- wideband and fullband systems Interaction with other audio components and systems in the car Special requirements/testing procedures for speech recognition systems in cars Quality models: what and how can be applied for the car environment?

QoS Development Group Encourages wider participation in international QoS activities Identifies and develop performance monitoring activities for QoS Identifies procedures & practices for inclusion in the ITU-T Rec.s Disseminates information relating to QoS techniques & procedures Development of coordinated approach to study of QoS Pursues other activities which may improve international QoS

Regional Group for Africa (1) Regional Group of SG12 on QoS for the Africa Region Encourages active participation of African administrations, regulators and operators in the work of ITU-T Boosts discussions on QoS challenges facing administrations, operators and regulators in the continent. Encourages participation of African countries in Rapporteur’s meetings, workshops and other ITU-T Study Group 12 events. Encourages African countries to contribute to the development of new/revised ITU-T Recommendations.

Regional Group for Africa (2) Regional Group of SG12 on QoS for the Africa Region Encourages the African countries to actively participate in the Quality of Service Development Group (QSDG) and other QoS related meetings Ensuring that ITU-T provides relevant information on QoS standards applicable to telecommunication networks, including test equipment for QoS monitoring and measuring, and assists in their implementation Acting as liaison body between African telco administrations, operators, regulators and ITU- T in matters relating to QoS standards

Regional Group for Africa (3) Regional Group of SG12 on QoS for the Africa Region Development and introduction of new technologies are demand driven Ideal situation would be to have phased introduction of new technologies in order to give time for industry and consumers to assess their performance This would allow administrations to adopt the appropriate regulatory approaches such requiring operators to customize QoS/QoE offering for different tariffs However this is not the case presently as technologies keep emerging daily However regulation may be needed where the market competition fails to resolve issues such as QoS/QoE There are examples where some mobile operators have resorted to massive deployment of half-rate codec to overcome capacity issues resulting in poor QoS (MOS values) Due to the above and many other reasons Africa needs some minimum level of QoS/QoE in the form of a “Guidelines” where different countries can refer to when preparing their respective QoS/QoE KPIs

Evolution of Voice Quality Impairments

Hot Topic in SG 12: POLQA™ - Rec. P.863 (1) New POLQA standard winner of rigorous technical competition Carried out by ITU-T to define technology update for PESQ/P.862 PESQ was state-of-the-art in almost any telecom service globally POLQA - “Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Assessment” - offers new level of benchmarking capability to determine the voice quality of mobile network services POLQA unified solution by OPTICOM, SwissQual and TNOOPTICOMSwissQual TNO was selected as the winning approach the underlying algorithms were subjected to extensive tests over 45,000 speech samples from a broad range of targeted usage scenarios wide array of tests covers the entire range of today’s telephony quality over the last ten years test and measurement vendors have widely adopted ITU-T Recommendation P.862/PESQ (“Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality”) and there are now more than installations worldwide recently developed speech codecs for 3G and 4G, and new techniques for delivering an enhanced voice quality experience have generated strong demand for an update to this industry standard POLQA is the answer the industry has been looking for

Hot Topic in SG 12: POLQA™ - Rec. P.863 (2) POLQA coalition formed by OPTICOM, SwissQual and TNO is the outcome of the competitive standardization process run by the ITU-T An expert group within ITU-T spent more than four years evaluating various candidate algorithms to find a suitable successor to older standards An enormous amount of effort has gone into ensuring POLQA works quickly and accurately For example, more than 100,000 samples of mobile and VoIP phone calls were used to train and optimize the POLQA algorithm POLQA is superior to existing standards, and clearly has overcome all known issues and limitations of PESQ The limitations of existing standards that are now addressed by POLQA CDMA Chinese 3G TD-SCDMA POLQA offers immediate, strong support for testing of new wideband 4G/LTE networks delivering HD-quality voice services Tests carried out during the POLQA evaluation included future technologies such as Unified Communications Next Gen Networks 4G/LTE HD Voice, i.e. "wide-band" and "super-wide-band"

Hot Topic in SG 12: POLQA™ - Rec. P.863 (3) TNO's Senior Researcher Dr. John Beerends, who introduced the first perceptual speech quality metrics to the ITU-T in 1996 and was co-author of the PESQ standard stated: We received a clear message from the telecoms industry, demanding a uniform successor of the PESQ standard, and I’m delighted that the rigorous testing that has gone into this evaluation shows clearly that the jointly-developed POLQA solution will be superior to existing and alternative approaches.” More information on POLQA can be found in the technical white paper “POLQA: The Next Generation in Voice Quality Testing” available for download from

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WTSA 2012 Changes are to come New Study Questions New Members of the Leading Team Sure Assumption, however Performance, QoS and QoE of continued importance to the global community and tus to the ITU

Any questions ? Joachim Pomy Telecommunications & Int'l Standards Germany Tel.: