ser groups, with well defined requirements. These groups may help their rivals. be manufacturers or users. They adapt international base standards Producing standards is an expensive business. It is estimated that as functional standards or profiles, which contain only a limited several hundreds of millions of dollars a year are being spent on subset of the permissible variants. Agreed test specifications and world-wide telecommunication standards activities. methods are also developed, to ensure that equipment designed to The standards making process is one of co-operation at many the different variants, permitted within the functional standards, will levels, both nationally and internationally. This includes co-oper- be able to interwork. Independent test houses then carry out confor- ation between industrial concerns within a country, between these mance tests against the selected profiles and certify products which concerns and their national governments and between nationals at meet this requirement. Figure 22.2 shows this three stage standards the international level. User groups and trade organisations usually making process. also have members from several countries. This interaction is shown Three key problems are seen in standards formulation: in Figure 22.1, remembering that many industrial companies are multinational in operation and have turnovers which exceed the 1. Standards take too long, primarily due to the need for obtaining Gross National Product of some countries. consensus between rival fractions. This usually means that de Co-operation is important to obtain agreement on standards, but facto standards, based on proprietary solutions, are available there is a danger that the many separate groupings and interests can ahead of an international standard. The standard making bodies often result in different standards being prepared for the same item. then have the problem of either accepting the de facto standard Historically this has resulted in the world being divided into two and abandoning th