ITU Standardization Sector

ITU Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three sectors of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and is responsible for co-ordinating standards for telecommunications and ICT.

Examples are:

• X.509 for cybersecurity
• Y.3172 and Y.3173 for Machine Learning
• H.264/MPEG-4 AVC for video compression

History

At the initiative of Napoleon III, the French government invited international participants to a conference in Paris in 1865 to facilitate and regulate international telegraph services. A result of the conference was the founding of the forerunner of the modern ITU.

At the 1925 Paris conference, the ITU created two consultative committees to deal with the complexitites of the international telephone services, known as CCIF, as the French acronym and for long-distance telegrahy, CCIT.

In view of the basic similarity of many of the technical problems faced by the CCIF and CCIT, a decision was taken in 1956 to merge them into a single entity, the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT).

In the 1992 plenipotentiary conference of the ITU, the CCITT was renamed as the ITU-T.