Editorial: Stronger or just louder?
David Molony
The United States is threatening to open a new front in the telecoms marketing
war, which Europe must respond to vigorously if it is to have any future influence
in communications technology.
If European governments and companies are not careful, their proud lead in
wireless technology and services, based on the global system for mobile
standard, will be swept away by U.S. equipment vendors. That industry - and
the new U.S. administration - is bent on building a dominant global standard in
high-speed mobile services to equal Microsoft's dominance in operating
systems for personal computing.
So far, Europe is way behind in the promotional war of words over
third-generation mobiles. Equipment vendors and mobile network operators
should consider setting up a new European forum for 3G cooperation, to sell the
European message as heavily as the U.S. is doing its own. This forum would
not rival the UMTS Forum, which focuses on promoting cooperation in standards
development.
And it is needed. In recent weeks, Europe's financial newspapers have admired
the chief executive of Qualcomm Inc., Irwin Jacobs, for making daring claims
that European operators will abandon their wideband CDMA systems - the
European flavor of 3G mobile systems - in favor of his company's CDMA2000,
which European vendors cannot deliver.
And another notable U.S.-owned newspaper suggests that operators in
Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom may never be able to afford
to build 3G networks, simply because they were forced to spend so much
money acquiring spectrum at auction last year.
In the United States itself, some analysts and technology journalists already are
convinced that European mobile operators will simply give up on home-grown
technologies from Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens. There is no question for
American observers that U.S. vendors' versions of 3G technology are better than
Europe's, and some reporters have even written about CDMA2000 and 3G - in
Europe - without any reference to wideband CDMA at all.
European and Asian governments and industrialists thought they had forged a
remarkable technology peace treaty at the World Radiocommunication
Conference in Istanbul last year. They secured an agreement, which the U.S.
subscribed to, to reserve the same waveband - roughly - the world over for
broadband mobile.
Now that agreement itself is at stake, because the U.S. administration has been
dragging its feet about releasing waveband domestically, driving vendors like
Qualcomm to forage overseas.
And Qualcomm is not bluffing. The company is ready to boost its European
marketing operation in London. It knows how to deploy former Administration
officials as lobbyists, although it has had mixed success in those Asian
markets it has targeted so far.
The company could, however, be deluding itself. A party of Qualcomm officials
who recently brought their 3G handsets from San Diego to show off at a
conference in the U.K. were crestfallen when European consultants said they
had already seen and tested 3G handsets over here.
That just serves to illustrate how often competitors know little of what is going
on outside. Vendors, service providers and consumers would all benefit from
new initiatives to explain what 3G is going to look like and what it will be
capable of doing.
Contact the Editorial team at editorial@cwi.emap.com |
