COPENHAGEN, Denmark-Reaching agreement on a single work item within a standards organization can be a long and laborious process. Reaching an agreement between five standards organizations across the world is nothing less than a minor miracle.
The miracle happened on 4 December 1998 in Copenhagen, Denmark, with the signing of the Third Generation Partnership Project Agreement (3GPP), an agreement to cooperate on producing global specifications for 3G mobile systems-specifically, those based on UTRA (UMTS-Universal Mobile Telecommunications System-Terrestrial Radio Access) and evolved GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) core networks. It involves a radically new approach to standardization.
Independent regional standards organizations have agreed to collaborate on a common set of technical specifications before converting those specifications into standards through existing procedures.
“3GPP opens up a new era for standardization, one which will provide worldwide roaming for users,” stated Dr. Kyu-Jin Wee from South Korea’s Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) standards organization.
The involvement of South Korea, the leading pure cdmaOne (Interim Standard 95 Code Division Multiple Access) player in the digital mobile world, is an unexpected development. The fact TTA asked to join is a major coup for 3GPP.
“Each standards organization on the podium has its own background,” said Nobuhiro Horisaki, executive managing director of the Telecommunications Technology Committee (TTC) in Japan, after the signing of the agreement. “This is an unprecedented effort in history.”
The five partners in the effort are TTC and ARIB (Association of Radio Industries and Businesses) of Japan, TTA, the T1 Committee of the United States and Europe’s ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), which fathered the agreement.
“We all understand our standardization activities now need an international focus,” said Karl Heinz Rosenbrock, director-general of ETSI. “Partnerships and cooperation is a promising approach.”
Chinese officials were present at the meeting as observers because China is a potential candidate for joining the club in the near future. The UMTS Forum subsequently has joined as a market representation partner, and the GSM MoU Association is expected to follow soon.
“This is an effort to complement and supplement other efforts, not to undermine them,” stated Dr. Asok Chatterjee, head of the United States’ T1 3GPP delegation.
But the United States probably will go its own way, and 3GPP2 (based on cdma2000) will certainly happen. “In the U.S.A. we celebrate diversity and believe in friendly competition,” Chatterjee added.
Sometimes the competition is not so friendly, however. And when conflicts occur, intellectual property rights (IPR) often lie at the root of the bitterness. That certainly is the case in South Korea where the country’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) is in litigation with Qualcomm Inc. following their joint development of CDMA systems. ETRI claims Qualcomm is not paying its due share of royalties received from Korean manufacturers of CDMA equipment and handsets.
Coupled with technical problems experienced with cdmaOne, such issues could make Korea abandon cdmaOne and move to GSM, according to some industry insiders-industry insiders who, naturally, belong to the UMTS community and wish to remain anonymous.
The TTA representative was more diplomatic. “Korean industry believes UMTS will be useful for telecommunications users,” said Kyu-Jin Wee. “Our involvement with 3GPP means that we have the chance to enter the GSM area.”
Involvement with 3GPP requires extreme openness about IPR issues. Individual membership in 3GPP is available to companies that wish to contribute to the technical-specification activities. Those companies must be members of one of the participating standards organizations and therefore bound by that organization’s IPR policy. The 3GPP also encourages such member companies “to declare at the earliest opportunity any IPRs which they may have and believe to be essential, or potentially essential, to any work ongoing within 3GPP.”
Additional IPR principles agreed upon between the five participating organizational partners (standards organizations) include the obligation “to encourage their respective members who may have IPRs which they believe to be essential, or potentially essential, and are unwilling to license such IPR, that early indication of such unwillingness be provided to their respective organizational partners.”
Two examples of such unwillingness are exercising the 3G community at present. L.M. Ericsson claims to have essential patents affecting both the cdma2000 and wideband-CDMA-based radio air interface proposals submitted to the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) IMT-2000 process. Ericsson has stated it will only grant license to these patents on the basis of full reciprocity on a global scale. In other words, if Qualcomm continues to threaten to block W-CDMA, then Ericsson will block cdma2000.
Qualcomm still is trying to block W-CDMA. It is prepared to negotiate licenses for cdma2000 but refusing to license its IPR for the current W-CDMA proposals. Qualcomm is demanding a single, converged CDMA standard that is equally favorable to existing cdmaOne and GSM networks.
Talks between all combinations of the parties involved or affected have been going on for months.
“This matter with Qualcomm is not yet over,” stated Rosenbrock. “We still hope it can be solved by the industry outside the standards bodies.”
He may be hoping in vain. The posturing and gamesmanship between Ericsson and Qualcomm continue. In early December Ericsson proposed a “harmonization solution” involving a reduction of the chip rate of W-CDMA from 4.096 Megachips per second to 3.84 Mcps. This solution would bridge W-CDMA and cdma2000 technologies and was offered “in a spirit of compromise” according to Ake Persson, vice president of Ericsson Mobile Systems.
Qualcomm immediately rejected the offer out of hand. They always have argued for a chip rate of 3.6864 Mcps to allow for an evolutionary path from cdmaOne. There is no performance advantage between 3.6864 Mcps and 3.84 Mcps, claims Qualcomm. The cdmaOne community maintains Ericsson now has simply admitted that 4.096 Mcps will not work and already has committed to silicon at 3.84 Mcps. To claim the Ericsson offer is a compromise is an insult to our intelligence, state the cdmaOne proponents.
This exchange was prompted by the ITU talking tough in an attempt to break the stalemate. The ITU said that if the IPR disputes were not resolved before the end of 1998 then all the CDMA-based proposals for the IMT-2000 air interface could be excluded from further consideration. The end of the year seems to have passed without any further miracles, but there still may be time. The ITU is, of course, free to stretch its own deadlines.
