When controversy comes calling, policy makers and wireless telecom firms turn to a high-tech sounding board whose work is based more on reality than on rhetoric: the Telecommunications Industry Association.
TIA, comprised of U.S. and foreign telecom manufacturers that develop technical standards, has been dragged into the CALEA and strongest-signal controversies.
The association has not gotten The Call yet on 3G, but it might just be a matter of time before the White House rings up TIA for help.
Then again, maybe not.
Dorothy Robyn and Tom Kalil, National Economic Council members, have expressed some enthusiasm for pulling in an independent party to assess the technical viability of a converged CDMA standard for 3G.
GSM folks, like Sweden’s L.M. Ericsson, Finland’s Nokia Corp. and U.S.-GSM PCS operators, claim a harmonized CDMA 3G standard would be 10 percent less efficient than Europe’s own wideband CDMA.
The U.S. CDMA crowd, led by Qualcomm Inc., Lucent Technologies Inc. and CDI Telecom Inc.’s Dennis Parker, disputes that contention and says it’s just another ruse to keep American-made CDMA out of the European Union.
Motorola Inc., the leading U.S. mobile communications supplier, has taken on a Swiss-like neutrality on 3G. Still, Motorola and Qualcomm are game for TIA arbitration.
But the GSM camp is suspicious, leery that TIA is sympathetic to Yankee wireless firms and therefore is not the independent 3G arbiter the White House aides have in mind.
There are signs of a disconnect in U.S. 3G policy. At least one key State Department official was taken off guard by Motorola’s 3G repositioning and the flurry of lobbying at the White House on the issue.
… WTR mum on RF research; Motorola glum on WTR. WTR refuses to give RCR an update on its 5-year, $25 million cancer-research project (underwritten by CTIA carriers and manufacturers).
But when Louis Slesin’s Microwave News caught up with the WTR chairman at the Bioelectromagnetics Society meeting in June, George Carlo declared, “I stand by what we have done.” Asked why WTR hasn’t completed as many studies as Motorola during the past five years, Carlo replied, “The Motorola program is different, and I don’t want to comment on it.”
Motorola’s RF guru Quirino Balzano did want to talk, however. “We have lost five critical years, and money can’t buy those five years back,” he told the newsletter.
To compensate, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) got a $10 million federal RF research funding provision amended to the House E911 bill. The $10 million, which will come from federal-land antenna siting fees paid by carriers, is on top of the $25 million wireless firms already have paid to WTR-with next to nothing to show for it.
Thus, the $35 million Carlo tax.
