ITU AGREEMENT ON NEW INTERNET STANDARD.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) announced on June 10 that a milestone agreement has been reached in the definition of an important new Internet-related standard. The agreement marks the culmination of several months of close collaboration between experts in the Megaco Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) - the international body responsible for Internet standards - and - ITU-T Study Group 16 (Multimedia services and systems) towards achieving a single standard on the control of gateway devices. The new standard permits control of gateway devices that pass voice, video, facsimile and data traffic between conventional telephony networks and packet based data networks such as the Internet. Connections through these gateways allow callers from a normal telephone to make long distance voice calls over...