What are they?

There are essentially three bodies that formulate communication protocols and standards:

• International Standards Organisation. The ISO produced the OSI seven layer reference model, but also sets standards for character sets, programming languages and database connectivity. The ISO collaborates with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to ratify its standards. The ISO dates from 1947 and has a membership of around 100 smaller standardisation bodies from participating countries. The OSI model came from the work of committee TC97 - Information Processing Systems.
  
  
• International Telecommunications Union. The ITU was formerly the CCITT (Comite Consulatif Telegraphique et Telephonique). The ITU works mainly to develop new standards to allow equipment to connect with public telecommunications. Emergent technologies such as ISDN owe much to the work of the ITU, although the ITU is also involved in fax. The body publishes volumes of recommendations every four years.
  
  
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The IEEE is an American organisation that manages multiple research projects. It has international authority having been heavily involved in the standardisation of ethernet and token ring LANs. The IEEE established committee number 802 in February 1980. 802 has been responsible for the IEEE 802.3 ethernet and IEEE 802.5 token ring standards. Ethernet standards are discussed further here!

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