A Standards Bearer

ETSI writes standards that will affect the global wireless market. Keep your eyes on it for standards in 3G, location-based services and m-commerce.

Perhaps the "E" should stand for everyone. Despite its location, ETSI's scope is not Eurocentric. Indeed, ETSI is "a very important stepping stone to try and move away from national standards and move into international standards," said Mike Short, British Telecom Wireless vice president of industry relations and standards. "That's quite a different philosophy from the homespun TIA or ANSI approach, which has often tended to be more American standards for the American industry."

Short said that ETSI is adept at identifying the specific needs of a wireless market, wherever it is. Although it will be years before standards are truly universal, they are increasing in their scale.

"When you've got markets the size of the U.K., the U.K. could be lost in Iowa, no offense to Iowa," Short said. "What we can't afford to have are standards that only suit a small market like the U.K.; we need at least European standards, preferably global standards."

Bridging to the Killer-App In the hype over m-commerce and location-based services, carriers can get a little ahead of themselves. New services are often in production before the basic questions of who, what, when, where, why and how are answered. Some of those questions may get answered by ETSI work groups.

ETSI Project Mobile Commerce (EP M-Commerce) began last October. Though the group is in its infancy, time is of the essence to avoid market fragmentation and bring stability to the hype.

The group's many objectives center around developing standards for electronic signatures and electronic payments. EP M-Commerce also will be the facilitator for ETSI's interactions with kindred groups such as the European Banking Organization, the Global Mobile Commerce Forum, the PKI (public key infrastructure) Forum and the WAP Forum.

EP M-Commerce expects to operate for at least two years. Among the group's many points of emphasis are:

- Support for WAP and SIM toolkit issues along with multinode configuration terminals

- Interfacing fixed e-commerce and m-commerce

- Agreement on legal, technical and user requirements that allow consumers to control their privacy

- Building on ETSI and Europay Mastercard Visa (EMV) smart-card interface specifications

- Defining interoperability requirements in the varied m-commerce environment.

Expect specified tasks for these goals before the end of the year, with actual work to begin early next year. A particular strength that ETSI will bring to m-commerce is its 13 years of security experience, specifically with electronic signatures for e-commerce. ETSI's tradition of bringing different players together also will be an asset for EP M-Commerce.

"Where standards would be useful (in m-commerce) is to get a broader community of banks and mobile companies to look at security together," said Short. "To look at ways of settling micropayments together, to look at using smart cards appropriately as we move forward with security and mobile transactions."

In the location area, ETSI worked with the American T1 Standards Committee to establish standards. ETSI was particularly active in outlining positioning technologies for GSM carriers. Although GSM inherently knows the call's site/sector, advanced location methods are necessary to satisfy the FCC's E-911 Phase II requirements. The cross-Atlantic collaboration produced three different location systems: time of arrival (TOA), enhanced observed time difference (E-OTD) and assisted GPS (A-GPS). TOA triangulates the caller's position by using multiple base stations to listen to handover access bursts. E-OTD uses the handset to listen to bursts from several base stations and measures their observed time difference to locate the user. A-GPS uses the handsets' GPS chips but transmits the data over the network for extra support. E-OTD is VoiceStream's E-911 technology of choice, while Cingular Wireless tabbed A-GPS for its GSM markets.

Finding the caller is far from the end of the process once location-based services arrive. New network nodes were designed to interface additional steps, including authorizing services, ensuring security and privacy and interfacing to location-based applications. The gateway mobile location center acts as the crossroads for location applications. The serving mobile location center initiates requests for a caller's position. The SMLC also can collect network topography data to improve the location accuracy. Location measurement units provide additional reference information that also increases the location's precision.

Although ETSI work in m-commerce and location hasn't resolved any major issues, that's not to say nothing is getting done.

"In those two (m-commerce and location), they cannot claim any high ground so far in terms of standards agreed," said Short. "They can say they provide a forum for thinking about problems and where it may be useful for standards. If we take the mobile-commerce example, it is clear that mobile needs to be in m-commerce as much as the commerce itself. So the commerce requires involvement from banking or credit-card communities, as well as from telecom-centric folk."

UMTS Thunder UMTS is one of many heralded aspects of 3G. With promised data rates up to 2Mb/s, who can blame carriers for their anticipation? With such rates, UMTS will deliver multimedia applications to wireless phones. From video conferencing to warp-speed Internet access, UMTS may finally bring the wireless-data revolution to fruition. It also promises to achieve greater spectrum efficiency than its 2G predecessors. Though it sounds too good to be true, it has its challenges.

"Basically we are looking towards multimedia and progressively moving towards packet-switched protocol rather than circuit-switched protocol," said John Meredith, ETSI Mobile Competence Center specifications manager for GSM and 3G. "The move from circuit-switched to packet-switched is posing quite a lot of architectural problems. Of course, the two will co-exist for quite a long time. Very early thoughts (were) that perhaps the initial implementation of 3G would be a packet network from the out-set and the circuit-switched would be a dead duck, but you can't afford to throw away all that circuit-switched equipment overnight."

Given carriers' long-term stakes in 3G, it should come as no surprise that they are active in UMTS standards efforts.

"The participation in the standardization activity is equally weighted between the big mobile operators and the equipment manufacturers," said Meredith. "The driving force is split between the equipment manufacturers and the network operators who are all very anxious to see workable specifications as soon as possible so they can have their networks up and running and recoup some of the enormous investments in their license fees."

Expeditiously answering that demand may prove to be the ultimate challenge for ETSI and the other standards bodies working on UMTS.

"Time is the basic problem," Meredith said. "Given enough time, we can solve all the technical problems, but in fact, the problem is (that) we need to provide a service."

Meredith noted that the Japanese market has committed to deliver some 3G services by the end of this year. Allowing smooth transitions between 2G and 3G systems is another substantial hurdle.

"There are the existing GSM operators who will want to find a graceful changeover from their 2G service to their 3G service without leaving all of their 2G subscribers in a lurch without a network," Meredith said.

Meredith did caution, however, for carriers to not count on maximum data rates from UMTS all of the time.

"With luck you'll get up to 2Mb/s, but that's with luck."