The 3G Harangue

The words "next-generation technology" should conjure up images of brilliant scientists working against great odds, yet ultimately transforming magic into reality.

Take a glimpse at the quest for third-generation (3G) wireless standards, and you'll get a different picture. No inspiration, scant perspiration, and certainly no Thomas Alva Edison anywhere to be found. Instead, you'll find what resembles a political convention where everyone is speaking at once.

Third-generation wireless solutions are being developed by team players in dark suits -- a legion of corporate spin-doctors whose main ambition is to "invent" what already has been decided by a committee in Geneva.

TAKING SIDES Here are the facts. Europe is firmly committed to W-CDMA. Japan has submitted just one proposal to the ITU, and it is based on W-CDMA. Even South Korea, which has standardized on cdmaOne, has hedged its bets by submitting two proposals to the ITU, one resembling cdma2000, the other a W-CDMA look-alike. And although cdma2000 enjoys strong support in North America, a significant minority in the region prefers W-CDMA.

There are more than 100 million GSM subscribers worldwide, and although cdmaOne is growing rapidly, it has only 16 million users. European vendors have benefited from government mandated use of GSM, and they are hardly about to fling open their doors to a 3G solution based on a competing, foreign technology.

Although Japan and South Korea have implemented cdmaOne rather than GSM, they do not want to jeopardize domestic manufacturers' abilities to participate in the global GSM market, so they are demonstrating dutiful support for the GSM industry's 3G solution, W-CDMA. Besides, Asia shares Europe's affinity for committee-driven technologies, of which GSM is a prime example.

The 3G standards competition has revealed an industry whose guiding principle is opportunism. In Western Europe, GSM industry officials insist on the need for a single standard and warn of the harmful effects of competing technology standards. In North America, however, the GSM industry makes the exact opposite argument, extolling the benefits of competing standards in a free market. Thus, GSM proponents decry in North America the very policies they engineered in Western Europe to exclude cdmaOne.

For years, cdmaOne proponents argued in favor of competing technology standards. In fact, it was only due to their persuasiveness that cdmaOne finally was made a second U.S. standard. Now, however, the CDMA Development Group is lobbying Washington to force the harmonization of 3G standards, a move it claims is justified because "W-CDMA and cdma2000 are nearly identical." But the same argument could be applied to any commodity.

INTERIM ADVANCES Somewhere along the line, carriers must offer services that customers are willing to pay for. Despite their 3G tactics, both the GSM and cdmaOne camps have passed the litmus test for 2G products.

So while on stage the two sides are busy hurling press releases at each other about 3G products that won't be available for years, off stage their engineers are busy developing enhancements to their current products. Quite possibly, these 2G enhancements will play a pivotal role in determining the 3G winner.

The GSM industry plans to enhance its 2G technology in two phases. The first phase, GSM+, will feature high-speed circuit-switched data (HSCSD) at speeds of 64kb/s and above plus general packet radio services (GPRS) with burst speeds ranging from 14kb/s to 115kb/s. GPRS also will support simultaneous voice and data. In the second phase, known as GSM++, a new modulation scheme called enhanced data rates for GSM evolution (EDGE) will support data rates up to 384kb/s.

But the GSM industry faces a major problem. GSM is not all that spectrally efficient, and many GSM networks already are heavily loaded. Will operators be able to offer HSCSD, which consumes eight voice channels, at reasonable airtime prices? Will they be able to take several voice channels out of service to keep a GPRS channel open? And will they be able to take several voice channels out of service to implement EDGE, despite the fact that initially very few users will be able to take advantage of it?

The cdmaOne camp also is introducing a circuit-switched data service running 64kb/s, and a packet-switched service supporting speeds up to 64kb/s, plus simultaneous voice and data. But the cdmaOne industry may hold the trump card. Qualcomm has announced development of a high- data-rate technology supporting peak data rates in excess of 1.5Mb/s to work over existing cdmaOne networks.

Although there may be some way to modify existing GSM networks to support such data rates, it probably would consume more voice capacity than operators have to spare. Most cdmaOne networks, in contrast, are using only a portion of their total spectrum allocation and easily could dedicate some spectrum to data users.

Were 3G wireless a competition between established commodities, it already would be over, with Ericsson and its GSM partners the clear victors. But there are applications yet to be identified, technologies yet to be proved and markets yet to be served. Until those tasks are accomplished, the 3G wireless standards competition is just another ongoing debate.