Four major carriers, 22 vendor companies, and two national labs are collaborating in GMI 2008, the biennial Global Multiservice Interoperability testing event organised by the MultiService Forum (MSF).
In a two-week intensive testing, which terminated in early November, Verizon, British Telecom, Vodafone and China Mobile have linked their labs to create a global ecosystem for testing standards for a variety of service configurations. Full results of GMI 2008 will be made public via a Webinar scheduled for December 10th. 

This year's event reflects the growing recognition of the key role of IMS in enabling network service integration. Participants in GMI 2008 have collaborated to define six networked test scenarios of practical interest to major carriers as a focus for validating MSF Release 4 architectural framework and supporting Implementation Agreements (IAs). The four scenarios explore: End to end services without QoS, End to end services with QoS, IPTV, Location Services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Management/OSS.

Roger Ward, Office of the CTO, BT Group and President of the MSF said: "In GMI 2008, interoperability testing is conducted first within each lab, and then between labs, for each of the six test scenarios. With so many results to collate, a customized test capture tool had to be developed specifically for this event, giving the MSF a unique capability to capture, automatically aggregate, and analyze globally distributed test results."

"The work being done during GMI 2008 is laying the groundwork for enormous change in the consumption of information in any format from any network on any equipment, anywhere. IMS is more than a platform; it is a system that will enable the true convergence of services, using some very dynamic blends of network and Internet functions," said Mark Wegleitner, Senior Vice President of Technology at Verizon.

A particular emphasis on emerging IPTV applications has been underlined by the co-operation between the MSF and the Alliance for Telecommunications Solutions (ATIS). This is the first time the MSF has formally partnered with a standards organization and the resulting synergy is being hailed as a vital development for the future of IPTV. ATIS, through its IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF), has long been a strong player in the developments of IPTV standards, while the MSF is renowned for its ability to validate critical NGN technologies.

"ATIS is pleased to have partnered with the MSF during this interoperability event which provides such important feedback to the industry," said Susan Miller, President and CEO of ATIS. "We anticipate the validation of two key standards developed by the ATIS IIF that will provide critical groundwork for coordinating and managing elements and services in the IPTV ecosystem. This will be a springboard for increasing real world deployments of IPTV and set the stage for standards to support advanced IPTV services."

Roger Ward, president of the MSF, stated: "Early critics described IMS as a wonder technology in search of a killer application. That killer application turns out to be service integration, and IMS will provide network services the flexibility to move with the market just as nimbly as with the Internet. IPTV is just one example of a new-wave service that operators seek to deliver on a variety of underlying infrastructures, and we anticipate major media interest in our GMI 2008 IPTV-related scenarios that compare IMS and non-IMS based solutions."