Wireless Carriers, Phone Makers Back Open Standards
By Peter Henderson
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - The world's largest wireless handset manufacturers and leading wireless carriers unveiled plans on Monday to ensure compatibility between mobile phones and services by agreeing standards for deploying new networks.
Aiming to spur growth of the wireless phone market, the consortium plans to standardize technology to make it easier to develop and broadly deploy new services and to avoid proprietary systems.
Nokia (NOK1V.HE) (NOK.N) Chairman and Chief Executive Jorma Ollila announced the partnership in a speech at the COMDEX trade show. It includes major phone manufacturers, Motorola, Ericsson (ERICb.ST), Toshiba Corp. (6502.T), Matsushita (6781.T), Samsung (69500.KS), Siemens (SIEGn.DE) and Sony Corp. (6758.T).
U.S. carriers AT&T Wireless and Cingular Wireless, a unit of SBC Communications (SBC.N) and BellSouth Corp. (BLS.N) signed up along with Japan's dominant wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo (9437.T) and the UK's Vodafone (VOD.L).
The partners did not announce financial terms or give a time table for the plan which involves the GSM, WCDMA and GPRS mobile networks, but they outlined some standards they plan to jointly adopt, such as elements of browsers and messaging systems.
The adoption of global standards could run in to difficulties as companies disagree on the best way to implement technologies.
But Ollila said that success would open a broader market for wireless carriers and phone makers, make it easier for consumers to use their phones and speed the adoption of premium services.
The initiative comes at a time when mobile phone sales have leveled off globally after several years of runaway growth.
Setting the technology standards will be like setting rules for playing a game. Individual companies could make different phones and offer services but software programs could be written in languages understandable by all.
Today each often ends up doing things different ways. Short message service, the ability to send brief text messages on wireless phones, has taken off in Europe but has failed to take off in the United States due to disagreements on how to implement the systems, Nokia's senior vice president of mobile software, Pertti Korhonen, told reporters.
Agreeing standards would settle that, he said.
Thus a Nokia phone and a Sony Ericsson phone might look different, and one service provider might support an electronic banking service while another might not, but both phones would be able to download and run the same program.
"We need to create some uniformity behind the scenes," Niklas Sarander, vice president of Nokia mobile software, told reporters. "The key driver why we are doing this is -- fuel market growth."
Ollila said Nokia, the world's leading maker of mobile phones, would offer the source code for its phones "openly and on equal terms."
Ollila also said Nokia would license its smartphone platform to other manufacturers. Smartphones combine phones, personal digital assistants and Internet access devices.
The project's success hinges on the carriers and handset makers carrying out their vow to respect standards that each might want to make improvements.
Success would also be a cold shoulder to Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) as it tries to extend its influence on personal computers to the Internet with its .NET initiative of network standards.
Nokia's Korhonen said the alliance planned authentication procedures to allow mobile commerce which would be compatible with the Liberty Alliance, a new group spearheaded by Sun Microsystems Inc.(SUNW.O), the network computer maker whose Java software which allows programs to run on multiple operating systems and devices.
Microsoft has set its own standards for the .NET program, while Korhonen said the wireless industry consortium was focused on completely open technologies not controlled by any one company.
"We think that we should not stick to the limited business models of the past," he told a group of reporters, referring to Microsoft's lock on the operating system which controls virtually all personal computers.
The consortium also includes MM02 (BT.L), Telefonica Moviles (TEM.N)(TEM.MC), Fujitsu Ltd.(6702.T), Mitsubishi Electric Corp.(6503.T), NEC Corp.(6701.T), Sharp Corp.(6753.T), and Symbian.
04:26 11-13-01
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