World Trade March 25 1999
PHONES: Global mobile standard unlikely
By Alan Cane in London
The possibility of a single worldwide standard for third generation mobile phones seems to have faded for the moment, condemning subscribers to years of using different phones in different countries and pushing up research and manufacturing costs.
The radio communications committee of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations organisation with responsibility for global telecoms standards, met in Fortalcza, Brazil, last week with the object of setting specifications for a single, global standard to be known as IMT-2000.
It also hoped to resolve an argument over intellectual property rights between Qualcomm, the US manufacturer which has developed CDMA technology and Ericsson, a leader in the European GSM technology.
The indications are, however, that the committee has been forced to accept a compromise solution in which three separate standards would be entertained: CDMA2000, based on Qualcomm's technology and likely to be used chiefly in the US - and possibly China, W-CDMA, the European- agreed standard known as UMTS which will be used in Europe and many parts of Asia including Japan, and TDMA (formerly D-AMPS another digital standard), supported by chiefly US groups like the Universal Wireless Communications Consortium.
It seems that the ITU has now turned the family of standards back to the manufacturers for implementation.
There has also been no resolution of the quarrel between Qualcomm and Ericsson which turns on key patents to CDMA technology - which most experts accept can have a superior performance to the de facto digital world standard GSM - which are held by Qualcomm but disputed by Ericsson.
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