BELLCORE IS SITE OF INTERNATIONAL CONSORTIUM WRITING BLUEPRINT FOR INFORMATION NETWORKING.

RED BANK, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 13, 1995--The Telecommunications Information Networking Consortium (TINA-C), which consists of more than 40 international companies from many industries, will be headquartered at Bellcore's Navesink Research and Engineering Center, here.

Bellcore, the communications software and consulting company, also is a substantial contributor of talent and ideas to the consortium, whose birth was announced officially today at the Telecommunications Information Networking Conference in Melbourne, Australia. TINA-C's general manager, Deb Guha, is a Bellcore engineer, and Bellcore's Information Networking Architecture (INA) is at the heart of the consortium's work.

TINA-C aims to develop specifications for an "architecture," or general framework, that will enable new telecommunications services to be introduced and managed efficiently around the world.

"People who write software and design systems need to have some basic framework in which to work," said Stuart Feldman, executive director-information networking at Bellcore, and the company's representative on the consortium's board.

"Imagine trying to construct something physical, like a road or a ship or a building, without general blueprints. Or, imagine a group of people, each with his or her own set of blueprints, trying to construct something tangible together.

"The state of international interoperability in telecommunications software is something like that," Feldman explained. "Architectures are so different from place to place that it's hard to make things work internationally. TINA-C is an attempt to define a basic framework, an architecture, that we'll need if new telecommunications services are to be deployed and managed efficiently worldwide."

The new architecture, incorporating many of the principles of Bellcore's INA, will be based on advanced distributed processing, service-delivery technologies and international standards. Over the next five years, TINA-C's member companies will validate the effectiveness of the architecture through experiments and field trials, and will promote its use around the world.

TINA-C also will conduct demonstrations worldwide to show how the architecture can work, with the first set of demonstrations at Telecom '95 in Geneva in October.

The consortium has two types of memberships: core and participating.

A core member contributes to TINA-C by sending at least one resident researcher to work on the core team at Bellcore's Navesink Research and Engineering Center. The core team is led by Feldman and Harm Mulder of the Royal Netherlands PTT.

A participating member contributes by conducting one or more auxiliary projects at its own location.

Bellcore is a leading provider of communications software and consulting services based on world-class research. Bellcore creates business solutions that make information technology work for telecommunications carriers, business and governments worldwide.

CONTACT: Bellcore

Ken Branson, 201/740-6111