UPDATE) Cellular-Phone Standards Group Pushes Along Shaky Compromise
Dow Jones Online News, Friday, June 04, 1999 at 13:37
NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- The Operators Harmonization Group, a panel of mobile-phone firms that has been trying to hammer out technical differences among competing standards for the next generation of digital wireless technologies, late Thursday signed off on a tri-mode standard that will be formally presented to the International Telecommunication Union and other standards bodies.
But the tri-mode standard is shaky and observers have doubts it will work in a real-world setting. The effort has been marked by a high-profile war between European firms, with their WCDMA or UTMS format, and U.S. firms like Lucent Technologies Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. that have been promoting a format called cdmaOne or cdma2000.
CDMA refers to a second-generation, or current, form of technology called code division multiple access. How to get to the next generation has been a thorny issue. The U.S. has urged standards groups not to impose UTMS as the next wireless standard for fear that the EU could lock competing technologies out of the European market. Swedish company Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, Finland's Oy Nokia and Japanese giant Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. have been pushing the UTMS format.
The Operators Harmonization Group's work in Toronto this week remains sketchy. It appears to favor Ericsson and its allies but does endorse the idea of a blanket format for the competing schemes. "This means we will see third-generation networks in the market by 2001," said Ericsson Chief Executive Sven-Christer Nilsson.
Wireless services currently include mobile telephones, pagers and other devices. But the next generation of devices will be capable of transmitting data and electronic-mail from the Internet and will provide other services, including video conferencing. Whereas second-generation mobile service providers compete almost exclusively on price, third-generation providers will duel by providing various types of value-added services.
Europe became the front-runner in the second generation wireless market, chiefly because it set the Global System for Mobile Communication, or GSM, technology as the Europe-wide cellular standard. The prize in the third-generation battle is global hegemony, a single cellular standard that would allow companies to sell a phone in one country and let consumers use it in any other.
The OHG was trying to address key technical parameters that have prevented work to harmonize the competing next-generation CDMA standards. Carriers earlier this year agreed upon a general framework for third-generation technology that includes a tri-mode family of CDMA modes and systems. That plan was agreed to by telecom executives in a U.S.-EU summit in Washington in February.
But telecom experts say much work remains and that the various companies are still trying to push their formats ahead of others. The Commerce Department hasn't yet commented on the latest efforts, in part because it wants to see the details and whther the ITU will embrace the OHG proposal.
Copyright (c) 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
|
