On 10 July 2023, Mr. Luis Jorge Romero, Director General of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), had a high-level meeting with officials from the China Communications Standards Association (CCSA). The CCSA is a national and unified communications standardization organization that carries out standardization work in the field of information and communication technology. In addition, CCSA is one of the seven organization partners of 3GPP. The meeting was attended by Mr. Wen Ku, Secretary General of CCSA; Mr. Nan Xinsheng, Vice Secretary General of CCSA; Ms. Wang Zhiqin, Chairperson of TC5; as well as delegates of Huawei. The European side was represented by the Mr. Luis Jorge Romero and SESEC team, including Dr. Betty Xu, Director of SESEC, who also attended the meeting and provided support.
The meeting was opened by Mr. Wen Ku, who gave the opening speech and welcomed Mr. Luis Jorge Romero’s visit. Then, following the meeting agenda, Ms. Wang Zhiqin, introduced the 6G standardization and research situation in China. Specifically, China intends to develop 6G standards in 3GPP after 2025. To facilitate the 6G standardization development, in June 2019 the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) established the IMT-2030 (6G) promotion group, whose organizational structure is based on the predecessor IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group. CCSA also dedicates significant resources and efforts in this area: CCSA/TC5/WG6 carried out research on 6G technologies, and has developed a number of technical reports. Apart from 6G, Ms. Wang also introduced recent efforts of CCSA/TC3 and CCSA/TC7 in future networks. Furthermore, during the meeting, Mr. Wen Ku also shed light on the statistics of deployment of gigabit optical networks: household access bandwidth reached 100M in 2023, from 20M in 2015; 110 cities and one-fifth of consumers have got access to gigabit optical communication network.
From the European side, Mr. Luis Jorge Romero recognized the importance of meeting, especially considering the difficulties from the lack of face-to-face communication during the last three years, due to the pandemic. In addition, both sides agreed to continue cooperation with CCSA under 3GPP, especially on 6G standardization. To help Chinese counterparts to better understand the current situation and developments in Europe, Mr. Luis Jorge Romero elaborated on the European’s priorities in the communication industry. Most importantly, the bilateral parties also exchanged ideas over CCSA’s IPR policy, which is currently under revision. As for potential cooperation in the future, both sides agreed on the necessity of identifying and focusing in first place on specific topics that are of interest to both sides.
At the end, both sides deemed that the meeting was productive and necessary. Mr. Luis Jorge Romero again expressed appreciation for CCSA’s invitation and extended the invitation to CCSA to visit ETSI’s headquarter in France some day in the future.
