Standardisation Is a Pawn in a Power Struggle
Mar 01 2002
Despite an abundance of forums trying to establish industry standards for all things wireless, Europe remains without a consensus.
Instead, these forums have become a way for their members to try to achieve dominance in the future mobile market.
Initiatives such as the operator-led M-Services, launched through the GSM Association, and the Open Mobile Architecture each try to outdo the other, boasting big industry names as members.
Their aim is to establish open, universal standards to develop mobile applications. They deny competition, but already the differing interests of handset vendors, software developers, and network operators are creating rifts among and within them.
M-Services was a response to GSM operators’ concerns that the adoption of incompatible technologies was fragmenting the handset market and holding back growth in the mobile internet market.
It was unique for being led by operators, who finally realised that they are the ones who will ultimately reap the benefits of user-friendly mobile services.
Vodafone, Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), and most other GSM Association operators set out defining guidelines for vendors to follow, including standardised graphical user interfaces for WAP browsers, a common protocol for downloading content and a compatible format for multimedia messaging (MMS). They even managed to woo the handset vendors, receiving staunch support from Motorola, Alcatel, Sagem, Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia. Even Microsoft joined the ranks of supporters.
But things started to go wrong soon after the GSM Association allegedly approached Openwave to back the initiative. Openwave then released some of its intellectual property rights in its favour.
Former supporters complained that this gave Openwave an unfair advantage. Microsoft in particular was quick to point out that M-Services now lacked vendor-neutrality. Support waned and deadlines for compliant handsets in October 2001 were ignored.
To this day the only operator to have launched M-Services significantly is TIM, who cheerfully announced that the initial revenue figures from M-Services users were "too big to be believable." Even if no one else adopts the M-Services II guidelines that are already out this month, TIM certainly will.
While handset manufacturers Alcatel, Sagem and Samsung have already chosen the Openwave mobile browser for their upcoming M-Services-compliant handsets, Nokia and Ericsson both claimed that while they supported the initiative, they never agreed to produce compliant handsets.
Nokia has now become the key driver behind the "other" big initiative, the Open Mobile Architecture. Its aim is also to create a global and open mobile software and services market.
The list of companies that have pledged their support is a strikingly familiar one: ranging from vendors Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, to operators like Vodafone, AT&T Wireless, mmO2, and Telefonica Moviles. Openwave has announced "support" only as recently as last week. Notable additions are NTT Docomo, NEC, and Toshiba, while Microsoft is absent.
While the power struggles continue between operators and vendors in the big forums, there are countless smaller fish for specific applications, like mobile gaming, mobile banking, or mobile music. Most are alliances between the non-operator non-telecom participants who are still wondering what to do about wireless.
The Mobey Forum was set up in May 2000 by companies including BNP Paribas, ABN Amro and Deutshe Bank to encourage use of mobile technology in financial services. American Express, JCB, MasterCard and Visa International set up the Mobile Payment Forum last November to develop a mobile payment standard.
Comverse and Booz Allen & Hamilton are members of the Mobile Entertainment, while the Mobile Music Forum was founded by Digiplug, Oberthur Card Dydtems, Thomson Multimedia and Trium Mitsubishi.
An exception to the rule would be the Mobile Games Interoperability Forum (MGIF) which was actually established by Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Siemens, to define open standards for mobile game interoperability.
A common criticism of forums large and small is that they are all rather vague in what guidelines they produce, defeating their purpose of producing a common standard.
Sometimes the forums have defended themselves by saying the matter is more about the "spirit" of open standards, while at other times they have said that making guidelines too specific compromises openness to developers.
Unfortunately, such debate is only now warming up two years after WAP was introduced in Europe, and a few months before its competitor, i-mode, is about to launch with a full suite of standardized applications.
In the meantime, as long as power struggles deter consensus among vendors and operators, a lively debate is all that they will achieve. At this pace of progress it is a wonder that a Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications ever emerged, or indeed that a Wireless Application Protocol has managed to come as far as it has.
thefeature.com
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