Dan Bieler, research director at Ovum, said NGNs will create new dynamics for the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) marketplace.

"As a rough timeframe for OECD countries, we expect NGNs to be in place by around 2012 for fixed and 2020 for mobile infrastructure," he said.

The fundamental difference between NGNs and today's network is the switch from current, "circuit-switched" networks to "packet-based" systems.

Italy's regulator AGCOM defines an NGN as "a packet-based network able to provide telecommunication services and able to make use of multiple broadband, QoS-enabled transport technologies, and in which service-related functions are independent from underlying transport-related technologies."

"We view the migration from circuit-switched to packet-based networks as a logical progression of the drive towards IP," Bieler said.