01 What is the CCITT – Comité Consultatif International Télégraphique et Téléphonique or ITU – International Telecommunication Union?

ITU-T – Wikipedia

The Comité Consultatif International Télégraphique et Téléphonique (CCITT; German International Consultative Committee for Telegraph and Telephone Service) is a now obsolete but often mentioned name for one of the technical committees of the ITU (International Telecommunication Union; German Internationale Fernmeldeunion).

As telegraphs, first optical and then electrical, became more widespread, challenges in international traffic quickly arose. At each border, time-consuming manual transmissions had to be made from one system to the other. As a result, numerous bilateral and regional agreements for standardization were reached starting in 1848. A start, after all.

However, the challenges were not solved satisfactorily. From March 1 to May 17, 1865, 20 nations met in Paris for the first International Telegraph Conference. Subsequently, the International Telegraph Union was founded and telegraph traffic was standardized.

The next big step came with the invention of the telephone in the 1970s. During the 1885 International Telegraph Conference in Berlin, the ITU began regulating international telephone traffic.

CCITT was created at the end of 1956 from the merger of the advisory committees

  • CCIF (for the telephone service, founded in 1924) and
  • CCIT (Comité Consultatif International Télégraphique, for the telegraph service, founded in 1925).

It was a permanent body of the ITU with its own organization. The contractual basis was contained in Article 15 of the International Telecommunication Treaty of Montreux 1965

Today, this committee is called ITU-T (ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector) and is the department of the ITU that develops technical norms, standards, and recommendations for all areas of telecommunications. The ITU-T has been in existence since March 1, 1993.

Known standards that are used in geocaching are

  • International Telegraph Alphabet No. 1 – ITA-1 – CCITT-1
  • International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 – ITA-2 – CCITT-2
  • International Telegraph Alphabet No. 5 – ITA-5