European Telecommunications Standards Institute members last week reached a consensus agreement for a third-generation mobile phone standard, incorporating two major proposals that were on the table. The agreement came after members failed the day before to reach the 71-percent consensus vote required to approve a single standard.
ETSI members agreed Jan. 29 in Paris on a Universal Mobile Communications System solution called UTRA, UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access, that draws on both wideband-Code Division Multiple Access and Time Division Multiple Access-CDMA proposals. The 316 delegates, representing manufacturers, operators, administrations and research bodies, agreed that W-CDMA will be used for wide-area applications while TD-CDMA will be used primarily for low mobility indoor applications.
ETSI was determined to approve a single standard by the end of January. The European Community will submit the proposal to the International Telecommunications Union, a part of the United Nations that has placed itself in charge of setting worldwide standards for future networks. Standards bodies in the United States and Japan must make their proposals to the ITU by June.
ETSI said the agreed solution offers a competitive continuation for Global System for Mobile communications technology evolution to UMTS and will position UMTS as a leading member of the IMT-2000 family of systems recommendations the ITU is developing.
Alcatel, Bosch, L.M. Ericsson, Italtel, Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp., Northern Telecom Ltd., Siemens AG and Sony Corp. and other leading manufacturers and carriers, including Japanese companies, submitted the proposal.
In a joint statement, the nine companies said: “This is the first step toward achieving a worldwide standard for the next millennium, and we believe that our combined solution will facilitate a superior UMTS technology that will drive the timely development of equipment and applications for the benefit of mobile network operators and end users worldwide.”
The companies said they have agreed to work together to provide clear guidelines for handling intellectual property rights essential to the UMTS air-interface specification that will allow them to incur reasonable manufacturing costs.
“We are extremely satisfied with the decision,” said Arja Suominen, a Nokia spokeswoman. “This will now create a global market, and it will be the widest third-generation standard in use.”
Nokia and Ericsson were the key backers of the W-CDMA proposal. Both are working with NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest cellular operator, to develop its third-generation system based on W-CDMA technology. DoCoMo, which participated in the ETSI meeting as an observer and helped with the proposal, welcomed the solution and expressed full support, raising the prospect of an alignment between European and Japanese third-generation standards. At least 16 GSM operators in Asia Pacific have publicly expressed their support for W-CDMA technology as the third-generation standard and had urged ETSI to vote for the proposal.
The Telecommunications Industry Association, which is working on its own proposal for the United States, has a difficult task since the United States currently uses three different digital standards.
The ETSI decision “puts a lot of pressure on the U.S., including TIA members, to come up with a single U.S. position,” said Eric Nelson, TIA’s vice president of international affairs. “We are trying hard to come up with a single U.S. standard.”
TIA is trying to submit its proposal to the ITU by March, said Eric Schimmel, vice president of TIA. “Right now, each of our standard subcommittees are still going parallel tracks and expect to make a proposal. What may happen is that considerations will be made with respect to interoperability … We may try to make sure that even though there are different air-interface technologies proposed, they will all meet some minimum criteria within the ITU to conform to a family concept for network interoperability in [other countries],” he said.
Japan’s Association of Radio Industries and Business also may face a compromise situation because the country adopted cdmaOne technology, Interim Standard 95, last year as an official standard, but DoCoMo is committed to W-CDMA technology. Korea, the starting place of cdmaOne commercial systems, also is looking at incorporating both cdmaOne and W-CDMA technologies. SK Telecom, Korea’s largest wireless operator, is pushing ahead with a solution that combines cdmaOne with W-CDMA. SK Telecom and DoCoMo plan to jointly develop commercial systems by 2000.
Schimmel said TIA will have meetings with ETSI and ARIB this month at which “there will be opportunities to discuss commonalities of interest.”
Though W-CDMA was the favorite among ETSI members, it was evident since November that one standard likely would not win the consensus, with industry heavyweights Nortel, Motorola, Siemens and others falling on the side of TD-CDMA technology, and Nokia, Ericsson and some strong European carriers supporting W-CDMA-based solution.
W-CDMA won the majority of votes in an ETSI test ballot in December, but didn’t get the 71-percent required for adoption. In the official vote, ETSI members voted 61.1 percent in favor of W-CDMA technology. TD-CDMA received 38.7 percent of the vote.
Qualcomm Inc., which holds rights to cdmaOne technology, did not throw its support behind any of the proposed UMTS schemes. A Qualcomm executive in October said the company’s vision is to evolve a third-generation system that is compatible with cdmaOne and hybrid GSM-cdmaOne networks. The company did not comment on ETSI’s decision but said it is working on expanding the capabilities of cdmaOne technology to include higher data rates. This technology would be available before W-CDMA technology is available, said Qualcomm spokeswoman Christine Trimble.
Qualcomm recently completed a six-month field trial with Vodafone Ltd. in the United Kingdom that demonstrated the compatibility of a cdmaOne base station in an existing GSM network and is expected to release the results soon.
Manufacturer Lucent Technologies Inc. also did not support either technology because it believed there were merits to both proposals. It welcomed ETSI’s decision.
“It’s consistent with our belief that current generation systems would evolve into a family of next-generation systems,” said Lucent spokesman Sam Gronner.
The manufacturer also is working on a prototype system for DoCoMo and is involved in next-generation efforts elsewhere, including the United States and Japan.
