Fremont, CA, August 29, 2011 – Following the Technical meeting in Denver, Colorado, the MSF (MultiService Forum) today announced that Acme Packet,  lcatel-Lucent, Codenomicon, D2 Technologies, EXFO, IPneo, Metaswitch, Samsung, Stoke, Traffix Systems and VSS Monitoring are participating in the September Voice  ver LTE (VoLTE) Interoperability Testing Event. These companies join event sponsors GENBAND, Huawei, ZTE, Alepo, Bridgewater Systems, Cisco and WiChorus, a  Tellabs company as VoLTE IOT (Interoperability Testing) participants. This brings the total event participation to 25 companies. The test event, in partnership with the GSMA as part of its global VoLTE initiative, will be hosted by MSF and mobile operators Vodafone and China Mobile in the Vodafone Test and Innovation Centre in Dusseldorf, Germany, and the China Mobile research Institute Laboratory in Beijing, China.

“The success of VoLTE requires interoperability to simplify interconnect and roaming. The participants in the MSF's IOT event demonstrate the diverse nature of the players that will make up the VoLTE ecosystem, and represents a significant step towards practical, interoperable implementations of VoLTE,” said Dan Warren, Senior Director of Technology, GSMA.

Unlike other recent VoLTE events the MSF VoLTE interoperability event is not focused solely on UE interoperability, but in addition targets interoperability of EPC, PCC, and IMS core elements supplied by different vendors. Test scenarios include VoLTE basic interoperability, but also focus on global Roaming and Interconnection as specified by the GSMA.

MultiService Forum: Industry Leaders Join MSF VoLTE Testing "The event will give operators the confidence that Voice over LTE is a foundation on which to build tomorrow’s voice and rich communications services networks," said Kyu-Ouk Lee, Project Leader and Principal Researcher at Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), and newly elected MSF President.

NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) launched a new MSF initiative to develop conformance test cases for the LTE EPC interfaces. The goal of this initiative is to develop a suite of EPC test documents that can be utilized by third party labs or network operators to evaluate whether a given vendor’s implementation of EPC interfaces conforms to the 3GPP specifications. NIST is looking to develop public safety conformance tests, as the basis for a future MSF IOT Event. Also announced at the MSF Q3 Technical Committee Meeting in Denver was appointment of Jesus Trujillo Gomez, Technical Marketing Engineer of Cisco Systems to the Technical Committee Leadership Team.

“We are very pleased with the diversity of VoLTE IOT participants and MSF member companies, as they both represent a wide industry spectrum. This will provide a solid base for the MSF technical work for the coming years,” said MSF Vice President David Hutton.

About the MSF:

The MultiService Forum (MSF) is a global association of service providers, system suppliers and test equipment vendors committed to developing and promoting open architecture, multi-service Next Generation Networks. Founded in 1998, the MSF is an open-membership organization comprised of the world's leading telecommunications companies. The MSF's activities include developing Implementation Agreements, promoting worldwide compatibility and interoperability of network elements, and encouraging input to appropriate national and international standards bodies.
www.msforum.org

About IPneo:

IPneo provides innovative solutions that bring tomorrow’s IP technologies to the hands of today’s users. Focusing on IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), IPneo delivers standardized client software solutions enabling rich communication capabilities for end- users. IPneo client solutions pave the way for operators and OEMs to quickly attain their goals towards a convergent All-IP-Network in order to leverage the end-user satisfaction and to drive new streams of revenues easier than ever before. At IPneo we value the growing needs for IP-based applications. Therefore, we provide our customers with a set of IMS for RCS, VoLTE, and VCC, that are all fully compliant with the IMS standards, quality-proven through a series of Inter-operability tests, and seamlessly portable to the leading handset equipment and mobile operating systems including: Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and soon on Windows Phone7.

www.ipneo.com