Abstract :
This article consists of a collection of slides from the author´s PowerPoint conference presentation. Nowadays three main trends driving tcleeommunications into the next millennium can be identified: third generation of mobile communications (UMTS), the impact of the l~ternet and service continuity. UMTS is seen as the enabler of wireless multimedia applications, overall (fixed-mobile, public-private, voice-data) convergence and the portability of a personalised service set across network and terminal boundaries, as defined in the Virtual Home Environment (VHE) system concept. Currently work is ongoing in different standardisation bodies (e.g. ETSI, 3GPP, ITU-T) and consortia (e.g. TINA-C, Parlay, OMG) allowing third parties to exploit the network service capability features. By standardising so called ´service building blocks´?? further referred to as service capability features and not the services themselves, the foundation for a very flexible intelligent service development/deployment environment is created. In the light of these recent developments, this paper investigates the enhancement of the current network centnc approach towards a real system approach, incorporating also the terminal service capability features.
