Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and PT Telkom Indonesia (Persero) Tbk (Telkom Indonesia) established the "APAC Telecom Innovation Initiative (ATII)" as a joint research and development initiative on April 17 with a view to creating new network services in the Asia-Pacific region with a look beyond 2020 focusing on virtual infrastructure technologies. The ATII launch was attended by Tadashi Ito, Senior Vice President, Head of NTT Information Network Laboratory Group, NTT, and Arief Mustain, Executive General Manager (EGM) of Digital Service Division, Telkom Indonesia, in Tokyo on April 17. The initiative will develop technical studies and proof of concepts (PoCs) regarding requirements for new network services in the virtualization era, and aims to expand this initiative together with various partners, including other service providers, who share the initiative's goals.

Currently, APAC service providers are faced with several common issues such as sustainability due to natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes and typhoons) and unique traffic demands/requirements due to uneven population distributions (growth/erosion of population) with a similar geography as island nations in the APAC region. With this in mind, ATII will propose new services and technologies for the APAC region. Moreover, ATII will attempt to accelerate innovation and create new markets using information and communications technology (ICT) to benefit society with a focus on sustainable development through collaboration and promotion with various partners in the APAC region so as to realize the vision of APAC service providers/countries to lead the world economy in the future.

With consideration of the APAC market environment, joint technical studies and PoCs will be conducted focusing on the instantaneousness and availability characteristics of virtualization infrastructure technologies to realize flexible and efficient network services. Initially, the following three projects have been established:

1) High Value-added Network Services,
2) Server Platform Virtualization, and
3) Flexible Access Network Virtualization.

ATII will immediately start the joint technical studies and has plans to publish whitepapers on the identified requirements, specifications and PoCs results. Further, ATII will liaise and share these findings with the related standards developing organizations (SDOs) and industrial alliances to expand and further develop ATII's activities.

ATII eventually hopes to perform field trials with participating service providers and partners in emerging markets which will lead to deployable commercial services based on lessons learned from the ATII studies and PoCs.

Source: NTT media announcement