FREMONT, Calif., Aug 29, 2011 - Following the Technical meeting in Denver, Colorado, the MSF (MultiService Forum) today announced that Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent, Codenomicon, D2 Technologies, EXFO, IPneo, Metaswitch, Samsung, Stoke, Traffix Systems and VSS Monitoring are participating in the September Voice over 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.

"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.

The MSF will host the VoLTE IOT 2011 Event in the Vodafone Centre for Test and Innovation in Dusseldorf and the China Mobile Research Institute Lab in Beijing in September 2011. The event is backed by the GSMA following the launch of its global VoLTE initiative in 2010, which is supported by more than 40 leading organisations in the mobile space. The event builds on the major success of the previous Global MSF LTE Interoperability Event that took place during March 2010 and reflects the industry's drive to continue to deliver major carrier driven events that benefit all its members in their quest to keep pace with an ever faster moving industry. The MSF VoLTE Interoperability test event will focus on validating core network interfaces to ensure multi-vendor deployment strategies for LTE technology and will validate the MSF physical scenarios developed to incorporate 3GPP LTE/EPC technology and the GSMA's technical recommendations, focusing on Voice over LTE, with the support of China Mobile and Vodafone. http://www.msforum.org/interoperability/VoLTE.shtml