A substandard standard?

All the sniping and backbiting that has characterized the digital air interface debate may have finally produced a positive result: The wireless industry now seems determined to avoid similar discord over the issue of wireless data standards.

That became abundantly clear last week during more than one panel discussion at the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association's Wireless Apps show, where typical self-congratulation about how fast the industry is progressing gave way to more enlightening discussions about forging a universal standard to help expand the appeal of wireless data technology.

The establishment of a consensual industry push for a standard wireless data technology, and a general agreement that the technology should be IP-based to support Internet-and, increasingly, intranet-applications to which everyone wants wireless access, would seem to suggest cellular digital packet data (CDPD) as the logical candidate to fill that post. But CDPD may not be ready for the job.

Most members of the wireless carrier contingent support CDPD as the universal standard, while some-presumably those lacking full CDPD network coverage-say hybrid circuit-switched CDPD is the way to go. But the more practical in the industry-even those supporting CDPD in some form themselves-point out that there are issues yet to be resolved for both technologies.

For one, CDPD is expensive-some estimate transmission costs to be 15 times that of voice. Part of what contributes to that is the cost of transmitting the IP address overhead packets, which, if passed on to customers, significantly ups the cost of transmitting data packets alone. In general, the pricing structure for wireless data seems slanted toward short messaging structures, not the full access to applications everyone is saying customers want.

As for the hybrid solution, experts say circuit-switched data transmission not only lacks the encryption characteristics of CDPD, it also poses the same pricing trap once your transmission makes it onto the CDPD portion of the network.

And while there's little doubt that both the network and device capabilities for CDPD are there, the wireless industry likes to talk in broad generalizations, touting CDPD intercarrier agreements and widespread network coverage without producing hard numbers as to who's using the technology, for what applications and at what cost. Until these real-world technological and pricing issues are addressed and resolved, the vision of taking wireless data to the people may be doomed to remain the stuff of trade show stages.