They may be working closer these days, but make no mistake about it, the GSM Association, the CDMA Development Group and the Universal Wireless Communications Consortium remain strong competitors.
All three associations will convene this week in Las Vegas at the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association’s Wireless Partnering International conference to discuss one thing they have in common: interstandard roaming.
The competitive environment for the mobile-phone industry is changing into a global one. Carriers are realizing they need other technologies to provide a global seamless footprint.
The GSM Association, which boasts nearly 300 million GSM users, last year introduced the Global Roaming Forum to work with operators and suppliers to develop interoperability with other technologies. Representatives from all three technologies convened in Chicago in late March to discuss interstandard roaming.
The GSM Association and the UWCC already are working together on interoperability, and Time Division Multiple Access operators and Global System for Mobile communications operators hope to offer GSM/TDMA roaming by the first quarter next year. TDMA operator AT&T Wireless Services Inc. is counting on a global strategy with GSM partner British Telecommunications plc.
The CDMA Development Group has said it expects handset makers to introduce commercial Code Division Multiple Access phones with subscriber identity modules by the end of the year to allow global roaming. This effort is primarily driven by Asia, the CDMA community’s fastest-growing region. Asian operators want to roam with their GSM counterparts in that region.
China Unicom wants SIM cards and GSM roaming. Vodafone AirTouch plc has said it is working on a CDMA/GSM handset to facilitate roaming between its CDMA and GSM properties around the world.
The UWCC has aligned itself even further with the GSM community by coordinating on the next generation of services, or EDGE, Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution. It would have been an isolated path for TDMA operators going forward as they struggled for economies of scale, but with its partnerships, TDMA operators are hoping to gain access to the worldwide equipment market. TDMA customers number about 35 million worldwide.
EDGE technology is a packet-data service available for both GSM and TDMA operators. The association is working with a number of unlikely groups, including the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, The Third-Generation Partnership Project and GSM suppliers, to make sure its technology has a global foothold in this generation and the next.
“Our vision is to really be a leading catalyst for strategic partnerships for technological innovation that would lead to the benefit of UWCC members and their customers worldwide,” said Chris Pearson, vice president of marketing with the UWCC. “We’ve gotten into some real strategic partnerships that five years ago people would question.”
But, “TDMA is not going to become GSM,” noted Pearson. “We work together where it’s necessary, and we fight to make sure all technologies can compete.”
Nowhere is that fight more evident than in Brazil, where the telecommunications authority, Anatel, is set to rule whether it will reserve personal communications services spectrum in the 1.9 GHz or 1.8 GHz band. The UWCC and the GSM Association are pitted against each other there, and the CDG and the UWCC have landed on the same side. If Anatel chooses the 1.9 GHz band, the CDG and UWCC argue that carriers will be free to choose any technology. If it rules in favor of the 1.8 GHz band, GSM technology is likely to be the only technology deployed since the band is aligned with Europe, where GSM technology dominates.
These associations also have another agenda in common: educating governments, operators and investors about the benefits of their advocated technology. And while the industry claims the wars between competing technologies are over these days, it’s only just begun as the third-generation market rolls around.
“Clearly, one of our goals is to have cdma2000 emerge from this year as the wireless Internet solution,” said Perry LaForge, executive director of the CDG. “Underneath that is to educate people to understand its advantages over GPRS and EDGE. There are going to be a number of issues with GPRS that will allow cdma2000 to become a superior offering … Our goal right now is to show our stuff. When we begin rolling out, people will see the advantages.”
Expanding and protecting cdmaOne technology internationally also is a key focus of the CDG. CdmaOne technology growth has more than doubled in the last year, now reaching 57 million customers worldwide.
With its international muscle, the GSM Association plans to promote GSM technology in places like Africa that do not have widespread telephone systems.
“GSM will be the only reliable voice and data service in some markets,” said Jim Healy, chairman of the GSM Association.
To that end, Healy also plans to create a virtual university that gathers and organizes information from which operators and interested parties can benefit. On the 3G side, the association is focusing on a new association member category open to vendors and new companies entering the wireless industry, including content providers and Internet-focused firms, which will undoubtedly play large roles in the 3G arena.
Healy said his association certainly has open arms for carriers wanting to deploy W-CDMA technology, a technology GSM operators plan to use for third-generation systems that competes with cdma2000 Interim Standard-95-based technology. Some of today’s cdmaOne operators may be looking at W-CDMA technology to avoid becoming an island among their GSM counterparts, say analysts.
“There seems to be a lot of good reasons why joining W-CDMA makes sense,” said Healy. “We chose the most efficient solution on a number of fronts. The huge strengths of GSM as it exists today is because it’s operator driven and it minimizes any individual manufacturer from getting a stranglehold on being able to extract higher margins in the future.”
The UWCC this year has begun an aggressive advocacy program worldwide to promote the adoption of TDMA and EDGE technology. Its awareness campaign includes hiring regional directors in Asia Pacific and Latin America to continually educate the press, analysts, operators and the investment community. The association launched a new TDMA/EDGE marketing campaign earlier this year and holds technology seminars throughout the world.
“Not only is it important to have TDMA/EDGE accepted, but to understand that it is the gateway to worldwide roaming through TDMA/GSM interoperability, especially in Western Europe and Asia Pacific,” said Pearson. “We can cover the world between TDMA and GSM.”
Global Wireless Editor Sandra Wendelken contributed to this article.
