Industry Takes On Global Roaming
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Story Filed: Wednesday, April 04, 2000 11:22 PM EST
Apr. 04, 2000 (Wireless Insider, Vol. 18, No. 14 via COMTEX) -- By John Sullivan
The vision of wireless is one of a shrinking planet whose people flit from place to place with mobile phones, talking to each other all the while.
However, a multiplicity of digital airlink technologies, and differing spectrum allocation strategies in different parts of the world, have created a confusing patchwork of cellular systems in which even supposedly globetrotting GSM operates on three different frequencies.
As a result, reality hasn't quite kept up with vision, and global roaming remains a problematic niche market, despite the industry's best-laid plans.
Several developments, however, point out that global roaming is becoming more prominent on the industry's radar, and efforts are under way to streamline the process of taking a mobile phone to another country.
Most notable of these was last week's first organizational meeting of the Global Roaming Forum in Chicago. The GRF is a project of the GSM Association, which nonetheless attracted supporters of other technologies and representatives from around the world. Both the CDMA Development Group and the Universal Wireless Communications Consortium sent representatives to Chicago.
The Chicago event was the first formal meeting of the group, and was devoted primarily to large-scale organizational issues. According to GSM Association CEO Robert Conway, the GRF will field a series of "technology teams" working on different interoperability issues.
"The preliminary view is there will be a chair and there will be technology teams for each of the other standards," Conway said. "Think of GSM as a hub and each of these other standards as spokes to interoperate with the GSM platform. What are being created then are teams of CDMA to GSM, TDMA to GSM, iDEN to GSM for example."
Other technology teams will deal with specific issues that cut across all the technological standards, such as security and billing.
"Our primary focus right now will be at the interoperability level as opposed to the standards level," Conway said. "But I think standards will be engaged at some point to ensure that you have a robust solution. That's critical, and that's the term we use here, 'robust, complete solutions,'which includes, for example, the billing aspect."
Although putting representatives of many different competing technologies in one room has caused problems in the past, GSM Association sources at the meeting said they were impressed with the level of desire among attendees to find cooperative solutions.
Questions arose over minor procedural details, they noted, but the overall goal of making global roaming more accessible to wireless users is a popular one.
In announcing the meeting, Conway noted that, "last year more than 650 million people in the world traveled to another country."
The GRF meeting is not the only activity aimed at taking advantage of all that mobility. Two days before the meeting, CDG announced that the Telecommunications Industry Association will publish the long-awaited standard for a CDMA removable-user identity module (R-UIM), the CDMA equivalent of GSM's SIM card.
CDG Director Perry LaForge said he was "optimistic that global manufacturers will announce the availability of handsets [using the R-UIM]this year."
Once those handsets become available, CDMA users will at least be able to engage in "plastic roaming" by removing the card from their own handsets before leaving home and installing it in a localized handset at their destination.
According to CDG's Director of Asia Pacific Projects, Terry Yen, the R- UIM is wholly compatible with GSM handsets. Users will be able to take their cards to Europe, for example, and use them in local GSM handsets just as they currently can do with a GSM SIM card.
While current GSM SIM cards would not work in a R-UIM equipped CDMA phone, Yen explained, "There's nothing to prevent that in the future."
The only reason current SIM cards would not work in CDMA phones is because they lack the necessary CDMA-specific files. Those files easily could be loaded onto the cards though, and Yen predicted "it's just a matter of time before operators put the CDMA files onto the GSM cards, and I think future GSM cards that come out will have the CDMA files on them already."
Yen noted the benefits of this interoperability aren't limited to convenience for users. The network flexibility offered by interchangeable SIM cards will allow the growing number of carriers using different technologies in different parts of the world to keep more roaming revenue in their own pockets.
With the cards, carriers will find it easier to send roaming customers to a friendly network regardless of technology, instead of having to send them to a competitor's network -- and pay that host carrier for the privilege -- simply because its network is compatible with the customer's handset.
Apart from plastic roaming, global travelers -- or customers of companies with networks stitched together from different frequency holdings like AT&T [T] -- can use multimode phones. The GSM world has seen a handful of multi- frequency GSM handsets intended for travelers, but they are relatively expensive and have remained a miniscule sector of the market, most often offered more for image purposes than because of high demand.
For the longer term, software-defined radio technology promises to avoid the hassles of plastic roaming and to reduce the expensive hardware redundancy associated with multi-mode phones.
However, SDR is a drastic step away from current technology, and the FCC is worried that it may not work well within the regulatory framework it applies to handsets.
The FCC has released a notice of inquiry seeking input into the state of SDR technology, and "whether changes to the commission's rules are necessary to facilitate the deployment of this technology."
In particular, the commission notes that radio transmitters are approved for use only within a narrow set of operating parameters, and typically require new FCC approval before they could be marketed with changes. This basic regulatory prerequisite falls flat when applied to SDR.
"By design, the operating parameters of a software-defined radio can be readily changed in the field by altering its software," the commission writes. "Such a change could violate the terms of the transmitter's equipment authorization by causing it to operate in modes for which it has not been approved."
The commission asks a series of questions about how to deal with this complexity, along with many other questions about how to bring SDR's benefits to market.
Although it may require a serious reworking of the FCC's licensing procedures, SDR technology eventually will solve many of the problems of global roaming. In the meantime, efforts like the Global Roaming Forum make it clear that the industry expects international usage to become a much more significant portion of overall wireless usage in the near future.
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