A Little Old>
Face to face: GSM guardians set new professional tone
By Joanne Taaffe
17 January 2000
As GSM operators watch their business models shift and change on an almost weekly
basis, the organization that represents them, the GSM Association, is having to change
itself too. Rob Conway is the most public face of this transformation - the association's first
full-time chief executive, brought on board last June.
Since then changes have come thick and fast. Recently, the Dublin-based Association
decided that its sole reliance on volunteer staff, who have to balance the demands of the
Association with the full-time jobs they hold with operators, was not sustainable.
Consequently, Conway - formerly head of global business development for Schaumburg,
Illinois-based Motorola Inc.'s international network ventures group and general counsel for
its subscriber terminals group - is currently overseeing the hiring of directors for its
end-user terminals, health and safety issues, services, security, billing and General Packet
Radio Services (GPRS) data working groups.
"For much of its history the Association has been managed by an executive committee ...
It's only with my appointment ... that we have someone coming in with a charter to help
make [the Association] as business-like as possible," says Conway, who acknowledges that
a number of challenges lie ahead both for the organization and the telecoms operators it
represents.
Even as the third-generation standard arrives on the horizon, he maintains that a large
element of the Association's role must remain the promotion of GSM as a cellular standard.
He does not, he says, see third-generation technologies diminishing the importance of an
Association, despite the fact that its very name denotes a single, second-generation cellular
technology.
Indeed, he argues that the collision between Internet and mobile, and the change from
second-generation (2G) to 2.5G to 3G means that innovation is now occurring at such a pace
that more than ever before there is a need for a centralized body to keep the industry in step
and avoid fragmentation.
"The whole area of wireless Internet; how to ensure ease of use; ... services and billing; ...
the migratory path from GPRS and EDGE [Enhanced Data for GSM Evolution] ... to 3G; GPRS
roaming - these are all critical matters," says Conway. "There are many different issues that
come up and it is important to have some focal point at a strategic level," he explains.
"The speed of change is forever accelerating. There are changes in the business model -
we're moving from providing more and more access to [selling] content and services," he
adds.
Changing membership
Part of that change has also seen the Association open up its membership to non-operators,
specifically to the IT sector, which will be driving many of the developments in GSM's
future.
Whereas groups such as the UMTS Forum unite all members of the industry in its work on
spectrum and Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems, the GSM Association has
always been an association chiefly for operators.
It currently represents 347 GSM, satellite and third-generation network operators, regulators
and administrative bodies. However, even that is changing.
"By its very nature, membership [of the GSM Association] is limited to carriers," says
Conway.
But last year the GSM Association took the step of opening its doors to equipment
suppliers too.
Suppliers it has signed up to date include Bull SA, Lucent Technologies Inc. and IBM. The
reason for wanting manufacturers on board is simple: the development work of suppliers is
shaping the future of UMTS.
"You can understand a large part of how the market will develop, [from where]
manufacturers will be moving," says Conway.
The Association hopes that working even more closely with suppliers will help ensure that
the GSM standard does not fracture as operators develop and deploy more and more
sophisticated data applications. "We need to work more closely with suppliers if we're to
have the critical mass going forward, otherwise there will be smaller pieces," says Conway,
adding that "there is more value to be had from standards."
Roaming deals
Not content with welcoming manufacturers into the fold, Conway is also attempting to woo
participants in other mobile camps.
He describes a roaming agreement struck between the Association and the IS-54 community
in the United States as "one of the foremost developments for the Association." The GSM
Association established a Global Roaming Forum during a plenary meeting last October,
and in November announced it had struck a second-generation roaming agreement with the
Universal Wireless Communications Consortium (UWCC), which represents operators
using the North American Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA)-based system.
The UWCC had been in talks with the GSM Association in North America since February
last year, and together the groups set up the GSM MAP Network/ANSI-41 Interoperability
Team, or GAIT, whose efforts, should result in a dual-band TDMA/GSM second-generation
phone. GSM operators will therefore be able to benefit from the agreement to fill in certain
holes in GSM coverage, particularly in Latin America.
But the ultimate goal, of course, would be to strike a similar roaming understanding with
Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) operators. The first moves have already been
made. In mid-December the GSM Association's Global Roaming Forum met with the CDMA
Development Organization (CDG).
But when it comes to talking about the details of the discussions, the normally forthcoming
Conway suddenly becomes very careful. "The CDG certainly attended the meeting in Fort
Lauderdale [Florida] on 14 December and expressed interest in the concept of
interoperability [between second generation GSM and CDMA networks],"he says, but this
is as far as he will go. He prefers not to talk about when the two groups will meet again.
Still, he believes that rapprochement between different mobile standards is in part being
driven from shifting market realities that no-one can escape. "GAIT was a business
discussion," explains Conway. Not only do operators wish to extend the coverage they can
offer their customers, but also recent mergers and joint ventures now mean that operators
now have a mixed palette of technologies on their hands.
"BT and Vodafone AirTouch [show how] the industry is changing," explains Conway. "It
used to be pure-form GSM or another technology."
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