Thursday 17 and Friday 18 April 1997, The Moller Centre, Cambridge, UK.
Opensig appears to have gathered a momentum of its own, having caused a serious stir both in communications research and in industry. Products which exploit the idea of open control of networks are on the market, and the IETF ION working group is abuzz with talk of different architectures for exploiting fast switching fabrics without the burden of heavyweight control architectures. So there is hope, it seems, for opening up the network and allowing really new communications services to be developed - services which are impossible to realise using the standards-based approach to network control.
In spite of the tantalising promises of Open Signalling, we still have a way to go in convincing the 'switching industry' to embrace the Open Signalling concept. Opensig '97 aims to explore some of those issues, and the sessions which we have organised will hopefully lead to discussions which aim to arrive at some consensus on the way to take these ideas forward. It is time to enter into serious discussion about how we can actually put the Open Signalling ideas into practice, as opposed to conducting academic debates on abstract architectures. We hope you will contribute in this spirit, and look forward to hearing your contributions.
Simon Crosby and Ian Leslie.