As One Door Slams, Another Begins To Open
*Check out SK Telecom's commets.
Caxton
By Jeremy Scott-Joynt
As the end-of-June deadline for air interface submissions to the International Telecom Union's IMT-2000 project looms, the political endgame is growing ever more stark.
The hopes back in February that the Europe-Japan united front on wideband CDMA could lead to a single radio interface now look shakier by the day, thanks to the rapidly-coagulating issue of intellectual property.
W-CDMA and wideband cdmaOne, the 3G successor to cdmaOne proposed by QualComm, look further apart than ever, unless crisis can concentrate the minds of those involved.
But meanwhile another front - convergence between GSM and IS-136, or US TDMA - has suddenly blossomed into positive collaboration. Here, where little attention has been paid to date, there could be the seeds of a wider agreement.
For months discussions have been going to and fro about trying to bring W-CDMA and wideband cdmaOne into a single package. Much of the impetus has come from NTT DoCoMo, which would prefer the two not to compete head-on in Asia, and reluctance has been evident from some among European vendors.
But now the situation has been thrown into sharp relief by QualComm's announcement last week that not only would they not sign up to ETSI's IPR statement regarding W-CDMA - as has been known since and exchange of letters in April - but that the W-CDMA camp could forget any IPR access unless their standard was retailored to provide full backwards compatibility with cdmaOne and GSM.
"Any commercial application of code division multiple access will require our IPR," a QualComm spokesman said at the CommunicAsia show in Singapore last week. "Our contention is that W-CDMA cannot go forward without it."
QualComm alleged that "certain European vendors" were determined to scupper cdmaOne at any costs. "Using standards bodies to create non-tariff barriers is no good for anyone," the spokesman said.
DoCoMo certainly took the threat seriously. "There are problems with QualComm" despite hours of meetings to try to resolve the situation, one senior official said mournfully. "We're talking about other methods of implementing W-CDMA without QualComm's IPR."
Others among the founders of W-CDMA were less diplomatic. According to one Nokia official, the problem was a basic difference between the GSM culture of open standards on the one hand, and the total control exercised by QualComm on cdmaOne for reasons of IPR income on the other.
"It's volumes we're interested in," the official said. "We don't make money out of IPR and we don't expect to. We make it out of selling products."
As for Ericsson Radio Systems - which some sources at QualComm have fingered as being at the root of Europe's perceived reluctance to engage seriously with cdmaOne - its director of industrial relations Asia Pacific, Dr Hakan Andersson, said: "If they are threatening, that's not the way to go. Standards are all about IPR."
He added, ominously: "We have our own court battle with QualComm, because we believe they are infringing our IPR on the solution they found to soft handover."
Those with a foot in both camps, though - especially in the operator sector - are among the ones most annoyed by what many see as the politics holding up convergence.
"I hate the situation that's happening," said Jung Uck Seo, the president and ceo of Korea's biggest cdmaOne operator, SK Telecom. "We've decided to go with W-CDMA."
SK, he said, had been working independently on 3G since 1993 and with DoCoMo since 1996, on the basis that common standards between Japan and Korea - the two biggest markets in Asia outside China - would create a de facto surge across the region.
"QualComm did a really great thing [by pioneering CDMA technology]," he said. "But they're asking too much in rights, when technology is more and more about common and broadly spread standards."
That was why SK had chosen to head elsewhere for 3G. "QualComm dictates the standards. That's why the cdmaOne population doesn't grow," he went on.
Korean mobile firms were the biggest cdmaOne operators anywhere, he insisted, pointing to SK's choice as a warning shot to QualComm that they could be left out in the cold. "Without us, QualComm would be in disaster," he said.
And that could be accentuated by the new close relationship between ETSI on the GSM side and the Universal Wireless Communications Consortium, for IS-136, on the other.
The two have now agreed to converge their so-called "2.5G" work - the final stepping stone to full 3G - into a single solution.
Ericsson's Andersson said this implied interoperability across the globe. Europe and Asia were GSM fiefdoms, he explained, whereas the Americas, North and South, were dominated by IS-136.
"This will work both in existing spectrum or in greenfield frequencies," he said.
More importantly, perhaps, the new relationship could bring the emphasis to where it really counts, according to Scott Erickson, vice president of Lucent's wireless networks group Asia/Pacific.
"The complexity in the telecoms world is at the network level, not the air interface," he said. "We're expecting a [3G world] interoperating on the network level, but with variance at the air interface level." And according to the information on IS-136/GSM convergence provided by Ericsson, this interoperability is around the corner.
The two are planning a network interlocating register (ILR), which will mean that service and billing information could roam smoothly between the GSM MAP network - the backbone of all GSM systems - and the IS-41 WIN network, which underlies the IS-136 world.
More to the point, though, IS-41 is also the network basis for cdmaOne, or IS-95. In other words, it now seems possible that IS-95 operators - should they so choose - could interoperate on the network level with W-CDMA, even if they still have difficult decisions to be made in air interface terms. |
