TIA Highlights the Increasingly Vital Role of Standards During the U.S. Celebration of World Standards Day

TIA Employee and Member Company CEO are Honored by ANSI

Arlington, VA (October 27, 2016) – As part of the U.S. celebration of World Standards Day, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), the leading association representing the manufacturers and suppliers of high-tech communications networks, today said that standards play an increasingly vital role in advancing technologies that are changing how the world lives and works. Presented by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), World Standards Day is an annual celebration and event and is part of World Standards Week. TIA has been a leader in standards development since its inception and many of its standards have been adopted internationally.

TIA today also congratulated Marianna Kramarikova, who is an employee of TIA, and Glenn Sexton, who is the President and CEO of TIA member company Northwest Information Services, for being honored by ANSI during last night’s 2016 Leadership and Service Awards ceremony.

Kramarikova received ANSI’s Next Generation Award, given to individuals who have been involved in standardization work for less than eight years and who have “demonstrated vision, leadership, dedication and significant contributions to his or her chosen field of activity.” Sexton received a Meritorious Service Award, given to individuals or groups with “a record of significant contribution to voluntary standardization and who have demonstrated outstanding service in enabling the ANSI to attain the objectives for which it was founded.”

“I am extraordinarily proud of the work being done by TIA staff and our member companies in the development of critical technology standards,” said TIA CEO Scott Belcher. “Together with so many dedicated people globally, they are doing work that rarely makes headlines, but it is essential to nearly every aspect of modern communications. Reliable and broadly accepted standards are increasingly important at a time when innovation and tech development is moving exceedingly fast. We thank ANSI for its standards leadership, and we thank all of the volunteers on TIA’s engineering committees for their tireless and exceptional work.”

TIA engineering committees have been on the forefront of forging new standards for public safety equipment and networks, and working to harmonize and advance the ICT industry. In addition, TIA works to educate the tech community on standards-related issues. TIA has been developing and expanding on relationships between industry and academe on advanced and innovative technologies in areas of machine-to-machine communications and fuel cell technology use. These relationships also give TIA the opportunity to help define for the next generation of engineers what standards are and why they are so important.

The development of standards also has its rewards for companies active in the process. Participants in TIA engineering committees gain a tangible competitive advantage over their competitors: gaining early access to information; exerting influence on technical content; and developing new markets for products, services, and technologies, while keeping market access doors open.