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The need for standards is as elemental to telecommunications as the need to eat is to Wireless Review readers. After a good feast, it feels like the need to eat will never arise again, but in a while, yesterday’s over-indulgence will be just a memory, and the hunger will arise again. When wireless was young, standardization was an essential part of its secret recipe. North America, with AMPS, had a head start. Europeans could only shiver on the sidewalks outside until GSM became available, and the cellular pot began to boil there. Interconnecting carriers slowly became an issue when consumers slowly realized that roaming was a possibility, and only a few years later, demanded it before they would sit down at a carrier’s table, let alone order. Consolidation somewhat reduces the need for inter-carrier roaming, but increases the need for even more capable standards, so that companies created from former competitors using equipment from multiple vendors can provide a dining experience that makes consumers’ mouths water. And, just when the plump and successful Telco starts to blissfully sleep off their last meal of standards, along comes a new industry, forcing them to squeeze back into their track suit, and get back in the standards race just to stay level with their new, leaner, meaner and hungrier competitors.
The U.S. wireless industry is getting familiar with government mandates by now, although this appears to be breeding contempt, not love. A mandate is like a meal with a phone-aholic. Just when you bring a course out of the oven, the phone rings. It might be a consumer group threatening to sue, the wireless industry complaining about the menu, or another government agency unhappy that they were not invited. So, while the call is being answered, the meal goes in the freezer for a while, everyone gets diverted to court or to another FCC rulemaking, and then finally they get back together. But by the time the meal is finally served, it is barely edible, and everyone has lost their appetite.
The FBI thought, for example, 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?
Local Number Portability has hardly been a different experience. The wireless industry believes that it will be outrageously expensive, but the FCC believes it will stimulate competitive juices. This meal has also 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. The FCC looms over the wireless goose, attempting to ram this mandate down the industry’s throat in order to make Pate de Numbers, while the goose complains about it being too much for its liver to tolerate. Poor goose.
Emergency Services started blissfully. Hand-in-hand, the wireless industry and public safety walked up the aisle to the FCC. But once the wedding preparations began, it was clear that neither the bride nor the groom could agree on what to cook, nor who was going to pay for the ingredients, nor the hired help and all the electronic entertainment. And the local exchange carriers hadn’t even been invited, yet their contribution as providers of interconnection would be vital to carry the meal from the kitchen to the dining room. So, although the first course has been cooked, few guests have sat down to savor it yet. And, the cost for the new plates and the second course is so high that those who have eaten the first often claim to have lost their appetite for the second.
And, in the FCC’s kitchen, with ingredients suggested 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 carriers actually cooking such a specialized meal.
Nothing is having a bigger influence on telecommunications than the aroma of the internet. The ‘discovery’ of North America (discovered only from a European perspective, of course), resulted in a whole range of new ingredients – hot peppers, corn and potatoes taking the rest of the world by storm. But when a new ingredient is discovered, it takes a long time before it can be incorporated into everyday recipes. Curry powder, for example, usually contains red pepper, yet this ingredient was unknown before trade between South America and Europe was established. Will the guests want Java with every meal? How long will it take to teach the cooks how to roast the beans in order to extract the flavor?
The internet will provide new services to consumers of wireless services, presented by 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 carriers can reduce their costs, and through the use of internet protocol stacks, move towards seamless services. Wireless will eventually not just be a somewhat awkward access method to an essentially foreign network, but it will gradually become the mobile extension of a homogenous network.
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). While the most urgent need still is locating emergency callers, standards for commercial services are now achieving more attention. While 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 the HLR), and will open new issues of security and privacy for the handling of what is highly sensitive personal information.
International roaming, like data, always seems to be next year’s promise. While much international roaming exists, it is often 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, carriers (particularly in the U.S.) will have to develop a bigger appetite, or the standards effort will continue to lag.
Wireless telecom is moving away from separate banquets for TDMA, CDMA and GSM, and toward separate banquets for 3G standards developed by 3GPP2 (the cdma2000 family) and those developed by 3GPP (GSM, ANSI-136, EDGE and Wideband CDMA). Yet, even with this continuing industry split, there are still many opportunities for cooperation on standards. Both groups are already stirring up the same security infrastructure (aka AKA), 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 W.H.E.A.T. from the chaff, there will be a bumper crop on the shelves of the big infrastructure manufacturers by next fall, allowing wireless carriers to fill their shopping baskets with both hearty and delicate new standards, just in time for next year’s festive season.
* W.H.E.A.T.: Wireless’s latest Hot and Exciting Acronym or Terminology
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