Work is under way at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute to ensure that all International Telecommunication Union-accepted third-generation standards can receive type approval in Europe.
The European Commission last month laid out the standardization details ETSI must follow. It wants technical preparatory work done before the end of the year and the first series of harmonized standards for IMT-2000 done by the fall of next year.
The EC’s mandate came amid continued pressure from the United States over the matter. The ITU, the global standards body, has adopted multiple technologies for the 3G market, including a tri-mode CDMA-based standard that encompasses wideband CDMA technology and Interim Standard-95-based cdma2000 technology. ETSI, however, has only standardized W-CDMA technology and others designed for migration from GSM systems, like GPRS and EDGE.
In response to the U.S. government’s concerns that Europe was closed to competing wireless standards, EU Commissioner Martin Bangemann indicated last year that European carriers could deploy whatever 3G technology they wanted as long as at least one network used W-CDMA technology to allow pan-European roaming and interoperability.
But that became a revolving door, the U.S. government claimed. Carriers are required to deploy an ETSI-approved standard.
