Accessibility prevents or removes barriers to the use of mainstream products and services. CEN and CENELEC, as two of the officially recognised European Standardization Bodies, are on the frontline to achieve accessibility in Europe: standards are powerful tools to integrate and strengthen accessibility aspects providing a framework, requirements and specifications for accessible products and services.

To steer and streamline its work on accessibility across all relevant sectors, CEN’s Strategic Advisory Group on Accessibility (SAGA) recently developed the brochure “How to address accessibility in standardization”: this information leaflet provides guidelines to CEN and CENELEC’s technical bodies on how to include accessibility aspects in their standards development work.

ETSI introduced OSM Release TEN, the 11th Release of an Open-Source project which first announced its Release ZERO in 2016 with the vision of closing the gap between the traditional way of building telecom networks, and the use of cloud technologies in telcos emerging at that time.  Release TEN defines an inflection point in OSM evolution, shifting the main goal from the implementation of a vision to the operation of production deployments. The co-operation agreement recently signed between ETSI and the O-RAN Alliance is a new and significant step towards positioning OSM as the optimized open solution for the Service Management and Orchestration Framework.

This new OSM Release brings, among other improvements, a new design that allows OSM modules to be decoupled and distributed across the network for higher resilience, facilitating edge and geo-redundant deployments.

Many initiatives have been launched both at national and European level to achieve the European objectives for climate and energy by 2030 and for the Paris Agreement. One of these is now a reference about environmental policies and governmental actions: CEN Workshop Agreement 17675 ‘Mapping of the mandatory and voluntary Carbon Management framework in the EU’. Published last 17 March, it is based on  proposal by UNI, the Italian National Standardization Body, that involved European companies such as JRC, ADEME, CLEOPA, in addition to other National Standardization Bodies such as DIN and BSI.
The document collects the regulatory (voluntary) and legislative (mandatory) tools existing in Europe for carbon management, clarifying the relationships and increasing their synergy, in order to maximise the effectiveness of the mitigation actions of greenhouse gases (GHG), facilitating adaptation to climate change and making the path established by EU policies interacting with market dynamics.

The ETSI Non-IP Networking group (ISG NIN) has just released its first three Group Reports. The first one, ETSI GR NIN 001, details the shortcomings of TCP/IP for fixed and mobile networks; the second Report, ETSI GR NIN 002, considers testing Non-IP Networking over 5G cellular Radio Access Networks; and ETSI GR NIN 003 describes the networking model that is the foundation for the new technology.

The Report GR NIN 001, titled problem statement: networking with TCP/IP in the 2020s, describes the challenges of IP-based networking for fixed and mobile networks and ways in which new network protocols can result in improved performance and more efficient operation. ETSI GR NIN 002, implementing Non-IP networking over 3GPP cellular access, describes and recommends approaches to test Non-IP Networking (NIN) using mobile radio access.

The French government intends to support French players in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) by creating, through the influence of voluntary standardization, the conditions for access to and success of their solutions and products in France and internationally. This action is part of the ‘Invest for the Future’ national plan and France’s recovery plan. In the future, all critical systems using artificial intelligence will have to be certified. This need for trust in order to access markets is progressively becoming established, judging by the outlines of the European Commission’s future regulation on the subject. In addition to this, digital sovereignty issues are increasingly considered important at the highest levels of governments.

Influencing European and international standards: Securing the use of AI is fundamental. This is why the French government has decided to commit 1.2 million euro to facilitate the creation of globally accepted consensus standards, under the ‘Invest for the Future’ national plan and France’s recovery plan.

ETSI published a White Paper titled MEC security: Status of standards support and future evolutions written by several authors participating in MEC and other related ETSI groups. This White Paper, the very first initiative in this domain, aims to identify aspects of security where the nature of edge computing leaves typical industry approaches to cloud security insufficient. 

Edge computing environments are by nature characterized by a complex multi-vendor, multi-supplier, multi-stakeholder ecosystem of equipment and both HW and SW devices. Given this overall level of system heterogeneity, security, trust and privacy are key topics for the edge environments.

Download the MEC security: status of standards support and future evolutions White Paper HERE

2021 is the European Year of Rail. On this occasion, CEN and CENELEC are proud to highlight the important role European standards play to ensure the well-functioning of a key sector for the future of Europe. Standardization on railways application is part of CEN and CENELEC’s wider work on transportation, a complex and large portfolio: it includes 1234 standards from CEN and CENELEC. These standards are mainly developed by two Technical Committees (TCs), CEN/TC 256 'Railway Applications' and CLC/TC 9X 'Electrical and electronic applications for railways'. In particular, standards on rail cover a wide range of topics specifically related to railways applications (products, processes and services), such as, among others, safety, rolling stock capacity, system efficiency, as well as cybersecurity, digitalisation, and automatic couplings. This work on rail contributes massively to the development of safe, innovative and efficient railway systems infrastructure, rolling stock and systems, and supports the EU in its strategic ambitions.

EMPIR MeterEMI project has released a report on current waveforms for static meter testing. In the report on the selection of recommended test waveforms for meters, in which is explained the rationale for the waveforms and methods used to accurately and efficiently specify these waveforms.  In summary:

• Most recommended waveforms are based on recordings on-site at real meter connection points. The waveforms have been simplified using a set of parameters, so they can be written down accurately and efficiently, suitable for inclusion in a future standard.

• All recommended simplified waveforms have been generated on an arbitrary-waveform testbed and several produce gross meter errors on “faulty” meters similar to the original on-site recordings.