GLOBAL ONE Alliance

Deutsche Telekom Berkom
Berlin, GERMANY

Sprint
Kansas City, KS
USA

France Telecom
CNET Lannion
FRANCE

Global One
Reston, VA
USA

Tools Used:
CORBAŽ, and the Kernel Transport Network

Description:
The Global One Alliance TINA Trial is a joint effort of an international TINA testbed running from February 1997 until at least the end of 1998, using CORBA. The partners of Global One Alliance, namely Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and Sprint use this testbed to validate TINA-C architecture for the implementation of the Global One Alliance Services Platform.

The overall TINA platform and the supported services have been built by integrating distinct TINA platforms and computational objects, relying on the compliance to the Ret and RtR reference points. Business benefits from following TINA-C architectures are expected mainly in the fields of seamless services, reusability, an extensible service platform, and user and service mobility.

The Global One Alliance TINA Trial is based on three types of services. All of them will run on top of the same infrastructure and will share a set of computational objects.

1. The first service is called Universal Access, which allows any user to retrieve his well-known environment and services from anywhere in the world, operated by Global One, for the cost of a local call. In particular, it allows a universal access to the second service.
2. The second service, called Call Completion, allows a user to be reached anywhere for telephone calls. At whatever terminal he has registered, he may be reached via a Personal Number that is a sort of UPT number. This service shows a possible application of TINA concepts to legacy telephone systems.
3. A third group of services will provide a set of group commmunication services, including video conference and joint document editing facilities. In addition to advanced support for group communication services, the feasibility of service federation will be validated.

The Global One Alliance TINA Trial has implemented an International TINA Testbed based on rather heterogeneous components, products and technologies. The trial will show a large scale experimental implementation of multi-operator services based on an overall multi-retailer TINA platform. The TINA systems are interconnected by a dedicated Kernel Transport Network. For the Call Completion services these systems control PBXs and Programmable Switches. The Kernel Transport Network uses ATM and ISDN networks for international connectivity and LAN technologies at the edges of the network. The TINA systems are multi-vendor solutions.

There exist six proposals for TINA Trials from different consortia. Most of them are scheduled for mid 1998. The main objectives are:

• Demonstrate TINA-specific added values
• Compliance with TINA specifications
• Multi-domain, multi-services environment
• Synergy with latest technologies
• Maximum flexibility in policies
• Field trial with real users

The Global One Alliance TTT is the first of these trials that is able to demonstrate interconnectivity between various providers in a transatlantic environment at the TINA'97 conference, November 1997. Based on a heterogeneous CORBA 2.0 distributed processing environment consisting of various ORB products from multiple vendors, the Global One Alliance TTT demonstrates a combination of the Universal Access and Call Completion services showing the ability of the overall TINA platform to integrate existing telephone (POTS) systems. The work is carried out at Sprintlabs in Kansas City and Advanced Technology Labs in Burlingame, at CNET and CNET Paris, and at Deutsche Telekom Berkom and GMD FOKUS in Berlin.