Letters to the Editor: Getting 3G back on the road again
12 November 2001
Standards set by the many
Continuing the UMTS vs CDMA2000 debate and with reference to a letter from an aggrieved Qualcomm investor (CWI, 8 October 2001), here's a few facts to get our American friends up to speed on Europe and 3G. European operators generate a large amount of their revenues from roaming. This means that any new mobile system/standard needs to be implemented (and agreed) by most European mobile operators. To do otherwise would be commercial suicide. No operator (and certainly not Vodafone) is going to unilaterally implement a new standard. In this market, by implication there can be no “first mover advantage.” The statement “roaming can be solved on silicon” has little meaning. Does the writer refer to “soft radio/4G”, the subject of much research but little in the way of concrete products?WCDMA was selected by European operators as being the best around in 1998 and had the largest number of equipment suppliers supporting it. Despite this situation, both Orange and BT are on record as saying that rollout for 3G will be slowed partly due to too many operators chasing too few WCDMA/3G equipment suppliers (a straight replay of the GSM situation in 1991-93). The supplier situation in the case of CDMA2000 is even worse. Concerning system speed, bandying around unqualified performance stats is pointless. In any case, as DoCoMo has shown with i-mode and a 9.6kbps link, it's not the speed, it's the applications that count. I suggest readers making investments in the mobile sector should first try to understand the situation in the real world. The number of subscribers in Europe is more than twice that of the U.S. and will remain so. European equipment markets are even larger. If markets define standards, then Europe, with the largest mobile market, has done just that. Pity the U.S. does not like it.
Mike Parr, Director, PWR Limited,Brussels
Government is misguided
It's no surprise that mobile operators are trying to recoup some of their losses from the government, in the light of the battering that the TMT sector is taking. When the auctions for 3G licenses took place, the market was booming, escalating license prices to levels that look well beyond their true market value. As the Government refuses to offer any form of help to the troubled telecoms industry, the future looks bleak. The question now remains as to whether it was all worth it.That depends on what happens now. Next-generation services could well result in an economic boom if market conditions allow their arrival. Instead of lining the Treasury's pockets in the short term, the Government should be supporting the sector as it moves to achieve this. That's the smart, long-term strategy, but the current stand-off is unlikely to bring it about.
Bjorn Krylander, CEO, UbiNetics, Melbourn, England
Enum: still no takers
In clarification of your article “Enum scheme hits more adoption hurdles” (CWI, 8 October), please note that interim procedures for the implementation of Enum have been approved by the relevant International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Study Group on 14 September 2001, but that no request for approval under those interim procedures has yet been received by the ITU.
Richard Hill, Counsellor, ITU-T Study Group 2, Geneva, Switzerland
Redundancy mustn't be ignored (from a CWI forum on totaltele.com on the subject of competition in Europe)
The condition of “connectionless competition” does not allow for sufficient redundancy in the infrastructure. This is of concern when underlying telecoms switching systems and resulting cyber dynamics exceed known complexity limits.
Michael Gell, managing directorEffien Systems, England
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