An Appetite for More

The need for standards is as elemental to telecommunications as the need to eat is to humanity.

When wireless was young, standardization was an essential part of its secret recipe. North America, with AMPS, had a head start. Europeans only could shiver on the sidewalks until GSM became available, and the cellular pot began to boil there. Interconnecting providers slowly became an issue when consumers realized that roaming was a possibility. A few years later they demanded it before they would sit down at a provider's table, let alone order.

Consolidation somewhat reduces the need for intercarrier roaming, but increases the need for even more capable standards for companies created from former competitors using equipment from multiple vendors. And, just when the plump and successful telco starts to blissfully sleep off its last meal of standards, along comes a new industry forcing it to squeeze back into its track suit, get back in the standards race, and keep up with its new, leaner, meaner and hungrier competitors.

Government Mandates The U.S. wireless industry's familiarity with government mandates appears to be breeding contempt, not love. The FBI thought, for example, that the wireless industry's CALEA intercept standard (J-STD-025) wasn't flavorful enough, civil liberties organizations thought it was too spicy, the wireless industry thought that it cost too much, the FCC said that without the pepper the FBI's recipe would be fine, and the U.S. Court of Appeals belittled the FCC's culinary capabilities. It is now likely that CALEA will stay in the freezer until well after Christmas. Cold turkey, anyone?

LNP has hardly been a different experience. Although the wireless industry believes that it will be outrageously expensive, the FCC believes that it will stimulate competitive juices. LNP also has been interrupted by delays and lawsuits, and the FCC is trying to add number pooling to the stew, while the wireless industry is complaining that it never wanted stew in the first place.

Emergency services started blissfully. Hand in hand, the wireless industry and public safety started planning a feast for the FCC. But, once the preparations began, it was clear that neither could agree on what to cook, nor who was going to pay for the ingredients, the hired help and all the electronic entertainment. And the LECs hadn't even been invited, yet their contribution as providers of interconnection would be vital. So, although the first course has been cooked, few guests have sat down to savour it yet. And those who have eaten the first course often claim to have lost their appetite for the second.

At the FCC, with suggestions by the National Communications System, the recipe for another mandate is being written - priority access service. At least this time it is clear who will pay for the meal. But nobody yet knows whether there will be enough customers to justify wireless-service providers actually cooking such a specialized dish.

The Internet Nothing is having a bigger influence on telecommunications than the Internet. The Internet will provide new services to wireless consumers through WAP and successor protocols, but the impact goes much deeper than that. By carrying all traffic on the Internet including signaling, voice and high-speed data, wireless providers can reduce their costs and, through the use of IP stacks, move towards seamless services. Eventually wireless will become the mobile extension of a homogenous network, rather than an awkward access method to an essentially foreign network.

Location, Location, Location Many standards exist for determining the location of wireless phones, whether based on network triangulation or built-in capabilities of wireless phones (e.g. GPS). Although the most urgent need still is locating emergency callers, standards for commercial services now are achieving more attention. Even though emergency locating is a well-constrained application, commercial services will be more varied, some requiring parts of the network to participate that are not required for emergency services (such as HLR) and will open new issues of security and privacy for the handling of what is highly sensitive personal information.

International Roaming International roaming, like data, always seems to be next year's promise. Although much international roaming exists, often it is constrained by the lack of standards, the lack of interoperability between standards and sometimes merely the lack of equipment to interoperate between diverse national standards. Perhaps, more than anything, providers (particularly in the United States) will have to develop a bigger appetite, or the standards effort will continue to lag.

More Harmony? Wireless telecom is moving away from separate banquets for TDMA, CDMA and GSM to separate banquets for 3G standards developed by 3GPP2 (the cdma-2000 family) and those developed by 3GPP (GSM, ANSI-136, EDGE and W-CDMA). Yet, even with this continuing industry split, there still are many opportunities for cooperation on standards. Both groups already are stirring up the same security infrastructure, and there will be opportunities for cooperation in the development of standards for backwards compatibility with GSM and ANSI-41, necessary to allow 3G phones to savor service on older systems. Migrating existing systems to IP will mean that SS7 legacy networks will, sometime in the distant future, no longer be required. Global industry consolidation may well bring cooks from two different schools together, and they will have to learn how to use each other's recipe books to create a more tasty offering.

The hours for producers of standards will be long and hard in 2001. However, given favorable conditions, and the time to separate the WHEAT (wireless' latest hot and exciting acronym or terminology) from the chaff, there will be a bumper crop of standards on the shelves of the big infrastructure manufacturers by fall 2001, allowing wireless-service providers to fill their shopping baskets just in time for next year's festive season.