Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
The terrible human tragedy arising from the massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan could have been even worse if it were not for a little known telecoms standard. In Japan, mobile operators NTT DoCoMo Inc. and SoftBank used a warning system, based on the Cell Broadcast Service (CBS) standard, to provide many of their subscribers with a valuable few seconds of notice of the impending earthquake and then the resulting tsunami.
In the event of a strong earthquake, the warning system is triggered by seismological readings detecting fast-moving p-waves generated by the earth tremor, which occur prior to the impact of slower-moving, but far stronger, s-waves. Using CBS technology, the system sends out a text message to everyone with a compatible handset, giving them a few seconds notice in which to try to find some kind of shelter. Ahead of the subsequent tsunami an alert was also broadcast to all compatible phones in coastal regions to give people a chance to either leave the area or move to higher ground.
My contacts in the Japanese telecoms community tell me that without this alert system the death toll, as high as it was, would have been considerably higher. Designed to work across networks and devices, CBS was developed to enable mobile operators to send a common single message as a “broadcast” to all subscribed devices within a cell. It has typically been used for sending traffic alerts and notices of localized events, but recent events in Japan really bring home how valuable such standards can be.
I have been attending industry standards meetings of one kind or another for most of my career and their work is clearly valuable to the individual organisations that I have represented, but recent events in Japan underline the value of this work to society as a whole.
The telecoms industry has adopted global standards to a much greater extent than other sectors. Thanks to the widespread deployment of GSM and related standards, for example, you can walk into a retail outlet, choose from a very broad selection of mobile phones and service plans, insert a SIM card and get service. You can then change your network operator, simply by swapping the SIM card in the phone. You can get on an aeroplane and fly to just about anywhere in the world, turn your phone on when you arrive and still get service. You can text any mobile phone number on the planet. You can call any phone number on the planet.
Imagine if this model were the same for electricity supply. There would be no difference in current or modulation, no difference in the physical socket that we plugged devices into. You could buy electrical equipment in Japan and use it in Europe, or the United States or Africa. The cost and hassle of having to make and carry country-specific products would vanish.
But the inroads made by fast-moving, experimental Internet companies into the telecoms industry have led some commentators to question whether telecoms companies are too fixated with standards, interoperability and reliability. As standards require a consensus across a global industry, they take time to finalise and can delay commercial deployments. In fact, there are clearly some areas of telecoms technology, such as smartphone software, where standardization is not appropriate and competitive pressures should be allowed to determine a de facto standard, if indeed, a standard is needed at all. Although the fragmentation in the mobile phone operating system market is a headache for apps developers and mobile operators, intense competition between the leading players is fuelling rapid innovation.
But other attempts to bring the freewheeling Internet culture into the telecoms industry have fallen flat. Lacking a tightly-defined standard, WiMAX has been held back by a plethora of similar, but non-compatible implementations. As a result, WiMAX has failed to gain significant scale and mobile operators and vendors have gravitated towards the much more rigorously-standardised HSPA, HSPA+ and LTE.
In the telecoms industry, the extraordinary success of GSM has ensured a major groundswell of support for global standards. Now we stand at the beginning of a new era in which the LTE standard looks set to be adopted by just about every major operator around the world, including those that have been on the 3GPP2 technology track. The widespread support for LTE shows that the telecoms industry understands the importance of global scale, a broad ecosystem, support for international roaming and easy interconnection between networks. Such things depend on standards.
Don’t get me wrong, in some areas the telecoms industry does need to adapt to so-called Internet time and its emphasis on rapid innovation, but it also needs to retain a bed-rock of robust, tightly-defined standards. The use of CBS in Japan to save lives is a timely reminder that widely-implemented telecoms standards can have immense social, as well as economic, value.
Dan Warren joined the GSM Association (GSMA) in 2007 as Director of Technology with a particular focus on helping the Association drive forward standards and technologies including High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) mobile broadband, Long Term Evolution (LTE) standards and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as well as providing internal technical consultancy to GSMA’s Projects and Working Groups. Prior to joining the GSMA, Warren worked for Vodafone and Nortel. Warren has a degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Applied Mathematics.
