It took more than one and half years to get a globally agreed definition on NGN, with the JRG (Joint Rapporteur Group) on NGN starting work in October 2003 in ITU-T SG13. This was one of the hardest jobs during my almost 20 years of international standards activity. From the beginning, work on NGN brought a lot of questions rather than visions and solutions. I believe many of these questions related to the name “Next Generation Networks”. Throughout the whole of my standards career, it was the first time I have come across this strange name.