1. TISPAN, organization, methods and definitions

TISPAN is an ETSI standardization technical committee that was set up in September 2003 through the merger of two other previously existing groups:

• SPAN, Services and Protocols for Advanced Networks, itself the result of the merger of two technical groups: SPS (Services, Protocols & Switching) and NA (Network Aspects);

• TIPHON, Telecommunications and Internet Protocol Harmonization Over Networks, which was created in 1997 as an ETSI Project to study Voice over IP (VoIP) and subsequently extended to the study of all telecommunication services over IP (including services described as multimedia).