WASHINGTON-The President’s Export Council, confronting the Clinton administration on third-
generation wireless policy, urged the White House against endorsing convergence of wideband mobile phone
technologies being evaluated by the International Telecommunication Union.
The export body, headed by AT&T
Corp. Chairman Michael Armstrong and comprising other U.S. firms, lawmakers and members of Congress, advises
the president on trade.
“We urge you to oppose government-mandated ‘convergence’ of any particular U.S. 3G
standard with the standard of any other region, since doing so would … relegate other U.S.-adopted, market-accepted
technologies to a lesser status and risk stranding billions of dollars in U.S. investments around the world,” said
Susan Corrales-Diaz, chairman of export council’s subcommittee on technology and competitiveness, in a Jan. 11 letter
to President Clinton.
AT&T spokesman Jim McGann said AT&T recused itself from the export council’s 3G
lobbying and did not sign the letter to the president.
In addition to promoting market-driven, multiple 3G standards,
the administration is pushing for harmonization of two Code Division Multiple Access 3G standards: one
developed in the United States and one developed overseas.
The ITU is scheduled to approve a family of 3G
standards in March, though a patent dispute between Qualcomm Inc. and L.M. Ericsson could delay that decision.
Because CDMA technology has not been deployed in the European Union to date, U.S. officials fear the EU will
ignore the outcome of the ITU process and pursue an industrial policy requiring all 15 member states to use the Euro-
based CDMA standard.
Commerce Department trade undersecretary David Aaron, responding to a recent Financial
Times editorial that criticized Clinton’s 3G policy, wrote in a FT letter to the editor that the U.S. approach has led to
lower prices and multiple national networks.
