Guilty by association: Wireless technology groups redraw battle lines

In a move seemingly driven more by political and economic motivations than by technological issues, two of the wireless industry's technology consortiums recently teamed up to push their third generation policy agendas.

The North American GSM Alliance and the Universal Wireless Communications Consortium-the group that represents time division multiple access (TDMA) technology interests-announced at the PCS '98 show that they will work together to promote a multiple-standards approach to 3G development.

"We both strongly agree that multiple standards help make a stronger market," said Greg Williams, vice president of wireless systems at SBC Communications and chairman of the UWCC. Together, the TDMA and GSM organizations will plead their case to the U.S. government and the ITU-T in their evaluations of 3G proposals.

Backers of code division multiple access (CDMA) technology advocate the convergence of the GSM-based wideband CDMA standard and the CDMA-based cdma2000 version. Last week the CDMA Development Group submitted a letter to 21 U.S. government officials reiterating the importance of "harmonization" for a worldwide standard.

"It's incumbent on the U.S. to see convergence of the specifications," said Perry LaForge, executive director of the CDMA development group. "For the objective of worldwide roaming, we want to make sure these standards converge."

The CDG's says the convergence of the two standards under the so-called family of systems concept has been proved by efforts in the Japanese market. TDMA and GSM backers, meanwhile, believe that their technologies have the capability to advance beyond CDMA.

"We don't want to converge where it involves dumbing down our standards," said Don Warkentin, president and CEO of Aerial Communications and chairman of the North American GSM Alliance. According to a spokesman, Warkentin was referring to the wireless multimedia and messaging services portion of the proposed W-CDMA standard, which would have to be removed for the wideband standards to be converged.

LaForge insisted that there are no technological issues barring the convergence of the two standards. The TDMA and GSM groups, he said, are trying to block CDMA developers from progressing more rapidly than their technologies can.

The UWCC and the GSM Alliance plan to combine their respective technologies in future iterations in which a combination of the platforms makes sense from a technology perspective, particularly in high-speed packet data formats.

One analyst said the standards debate is threatening the market opportunity for 3G systems but that the U.S. market would have been better-prepared for evolution if a single standard had been resolved from the beginning.

"3G's delay misses a superb opportunity. The delay and the infighting is a bad thing for the whole industry," said Andrew Cole, senior manager at Renaissance Worldwide. "The economies of scale aren't there with multiple standards. It creates a discord for the U.S. vs. the rest of the world."