OXFORD, United Kingdom-Much to the annoyance of those promoting competing technologies, GSM continues to grow in worldwide dominance. While the reasons behind its original success have now largely been lost in the fading memories of retired executives from the wireless industry, its future is coming under fresh examination as the GSM operator community faces a plethora of challenges that worry even the most hardy of chief executive officers (CEOs).
In an attempt to bring some focus to these problems, the GSM Association (GSMA) is looking to claw itself out of its inward-looking myopia and has set itself the task of injecting a fresh sense of urgency to bring about much-needed changes to how the GSM operator industry interacts.
While some have started to question the remit of the GSMA, the organization has decided to “reinvent” itself by conscripting CEOs or senior executives from operators to help establish a commercial, rather than technical, road map to return the GSM industry to pride of place.
Craig Ehrlich, CEO of Hong Kong-based Sunday Communications and deputy chairman of the GSMA, admitted that GSM operators did not feel the GSMA structure was the correct one to take the industry forward. “Maybe it had been the right one until a year ago. But, it was not suitable to take us through the next five to 10 years,” he said.
“The questions that the operator CEOs face are more associated with how they can get their companies’ valuations back up and how they can drive more revenue. This is a game about revenue and strategy, and less to do with standards, albeit they are critical.”
The organization defends its past track record by pointing to the unrivalled success during the last decade of the GSM standard. However, it does admit that during the past few years as business issues have become more critical, an association that viewed itself as more involved with technology and standards had to take a hard look at how to tackle the rising tide of commercial and strategic questions.
Inverted decisions
According to Ehrlich, under the auspices of the GSMA, this newly recruited board of CEOs will invert the current method of decision making. “The board of CEOs, or their designates, of the 12 largest GSM mobile operators, plus nine others that will be brought onboard by February 2003, will now be in charge of making these judgements,” Ehrlich said.
Ehrlich said the major problem surrounding the failure of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) technology was a lack of a communal decision by the GSM community. “The WAP era was during the time of operators making technology announcements and launching new services, primarily to boost their stock prices,” he said. “Instead we should have talked more together and made a bigger market. SMS (short message service) interconnect proved that, once the barriers were removed, the market got bigger.”
However, he admitted current interconnection concerns surrounding multimedia message service (MMS) have been a problem due to the GSMA’s working group not getting its tasks done quickly enough, and the GSMA’s execs not telling them to get it done. “But all of this GSMA governance change is a reaction, an acknowledgement,” Ehrlich said. “It’s a proactive decision that we’re all making that we have to let go of the legacy of how we made past decisions.”
Moving on to another technology that has failed to catch cell-phone users’ imagination-General Packet Radio Service (GPRS)-Robert Conway, CEO of the GSMA, said individual operators are doing all they can. “But, on a collective basis, unless it’s raised to a certain level within the cell-phone company, the executives may not understand the full benefits from a roaming agreement,” Conway commented. “We had a meeting earlier this year in Cannes, France, with around 35 CEOs, where they realized that GPRS roaming was important, but wasn’t being adopted fast enough. This led to roamFest, with the GSMA facilitating the need to make the agreements happen quickly. Over 90 different companies attended, which had never happened before. But this only took place when the CEOs saw the need to act collectively and exercised the clout to make things happen.”
Commenting on another problematic area, W-CDMA, the association claims the promotion of this standard is going to be a high priority of the board. However, its executives have declined to reveal any details of the plans until they are completely ready, only adding that the GSMA is going to do a lot of communicating to the press, financial analysts and anyone else caring to listen who influences third-generation (3G) technology. “We need to get our story out in a better and more effective manner,” was the only clue provided by Conway.
While painting a picture of action for the future, Conway has accepted that the GSMA’s effectiveness is going to be challenged by the fact that it did not always have the involvement of the senior executives of its member companies. With this in mind, Conway maintained the GSM operator community does have common needs, and the successes of their businesses need the support of other operators to help bring about global initiatives. “However, the operators need to put their own effort and leadership into the industry to avoid the problem of another WAP,” concluded Conway. GW
