The battle of standards over base stations has heated up with the Common Public Radio Interface initiative announcing the launching of its specification.
CPRI, which is led by L.M. Ericsson, faces rival Open Base Station Architecture Initiative led by Nokia Corp. CPRI said it completed its specifications ahead of schedule for the market in 2004. It announced its founding in June.
“The CPRI specification enables base station manufacturers and component vendors to focus their research and development efforts on their core competencies,” said the group, which also comprises China’s Huawei, Nortel Networks and Siemens AG.
OBSAI is a bigger group with 25 members, including LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, ZTE and Intel Corp.
CPRI said the standard allows for individual vendors to adapt their systems to the base station so each player can pursue its area of competency within a common pool. This way, the standard will evolve to a level where the new base station will combine the strengths of all members in the group.
But OBSAI claims that its standard will provide a more comprehensive base station, adding that it covers four functional modules and three air interfaces.
Both standards ironically claim to support open standards, which confirms some analysts’ views that open standards have become a ploy by wireless players to promote their products over the competition.
As these two initiatives grow, the Software Defined Radio Forum said it is conducting research into what operators will require for future base station architectures. It expects to release its findings early next year.
One of the initial findings collected noted that more than half of operators want infrastructure that can dynamically switch between air interfaces.
“We are working hard to ensure that not only do we collect data from operators representing all three ITU regions, but that we also include insight from operators ranging in size-large and small, regional and international,” said Bo Piekarski, chair of the SDR Forum’s Operator Requirements Study Group.
