The University of Zurich, coordinator of the SESERV consortium, has become part of the official Swiss delegation working in ITU-T's Study Group SG13 which covers ‘Future networks and NGN". The ITU is working on a vision document Y.3001 “Future Networks: Objectives and Design Goals” which aims to explore fundamental issues that are not paid enough attention in designing today’s networks as ‘objectives’, capabilities that should be supported by future networks as ‘design goals’, ideas and research topics of future networks that are important and may be relevant to future ITU-T standardization as ‘promissing technologies’.  The group defines a Future network as:

"A network able to provide services, capabilities, and facilities difficult to provide using existing network technologies. A Future Network is either a new component network or an enhanced version of an existing one, or a heterogeneous collection of new component networks or of new and existing component networks that is operated as a single network. The target date for deployment would be roughly 2015-2020" 

There are four objectives related to the awareness of utilisation and impact including environment, service, data, socio-economic. Each awareness area is mapped to 12 design goals Service Diversity, Functional Flexibility, Virtuallization of resource, Data Acces, Energy Consumption, Service Universalization , Economic Incentives, Network Management, Mobility, Optimization, Identification, Reliability and Security. Promising technogies are described covering network virtualisation, data/content oriented networking, etc. Y.3001 is only available to ITU members but a good presentation of the vision was presented at the recent Future Networks 7th FP7 Concertation Meeting by Alojz Hudobivnik "Future Networks standardisation at ITU-T". SESERV's input with respect to ITU's work on socio-economics is include in Y.3011 where a number of very specific comments and suggestions have been prepared. These will be formally discussed between May 9 and 11, 2011 at the next ITU meeting in Geneva. This contribution is entitled "Socio-economic Changes to Draft Recommendation Y.3001" and available for ITU members only on http://www.itu.int/md/T09-NGN.GSI-110509-C/en.