- MaCS - Multimedia Communication Service

The goal of the Multimedia Communication Service (MaCS) project is to develop and experiment the new generation of Broadband Telephony Service for the residential market.

This service-driven project will develop, experiment and assess user acceptance of new Multimedia Communication Services such as Videotelephony, Presence and Reachability Managemet, Local and Network Address Book, Multimedia Messaging, etc. and provide business relevance analysis for Next-Generation-Network based Multimedia Communication Services.

For the network aspect, the MaCS project will rely on emerging Next Generation Network infrastructures. The NGN is a converged packet network currently under standardization in ETSI and ITU, with an open standard layered architecture, guaranteed Quality of Service , security, mobility, flexible service platform, etc.

For the terminal aspect, the MaCS project will foster the development of pre-competitive multimedia terminals such as videophones, videobox , Webtabs, PDAs and soft clients for PCs.

The MaCS project will use an end-to-end NGN solution, and will set up and operate a pan-European service lab, where services are developed, tested and submitted to human factors analysis. This pan-European Lab, includes major European operators, network and terminal providers, and will handle interoperability issues and therefore hasten market maturity with the emergence of pre-competitive interoperable network infrastructures and terminal equipments.

Finally, the MaCS project will foster a consensus view in the European industry, will provide inputs to standardization and will create the technical and business momentum for Multimedia Communication Service mass market commercialization in 2006 and beyond.