The TINA consortium is now in its second phase and there has been a lot of work done by the participants in defining an architecture and putting a lot of detail behind the architecture. There is a general feeling in the telecommunications community that compliance with the TINA principles holds a lot of benefits for TelCos and manufacturer.

Over the years EURESCOM has had projects that provided more detail to parts of the TINA approach. Now there is a need to take an overview of TINA and coldly assess its usefulness to TelCos today. Another reason for this assessment is that the way to begin to migrate towards "TINA-like" networks is not clear and this needs to be identified if TelCos are ever going to get the benefit from TINA.

As the complexity of our networks increases we need clarity of architectural ideas so that diverse services over different network types across different business domains can be managed and controlled. This Study will determine if TINA can do this for us.

Objectives

The objective of this Study are to:

• provide an executive summary of TINA for Senior Managers at Shareholders organisations, and
• explain how they could use the TINA principles and the benefit from doing so.

This Study will have four component parts:

• The overview of TINA today and what alternatives are available,
• A SWOT analysis of TINA
• The assessment of the applicability of TINA principles to current evolving networks, and
• Recommendations on how TINA principles can be adopted today.

Of course there is the possibility that the assessment of the applicability of TINA could conclude that it is not applicable and therefore the fourth part of the Study would not be done.