Dear Editor:
There was an article by Paul Rasmussen in the March-April edition of Global Wireless that discusses the situation concerning ERMES two-way. In that article, he says some disparaging things about ETSI and, in particular, about the committee RP04.
Could I please bring it to the attention of your readers that the article is incorrect in several aspects?
In the first paragraph, Mr. Rasmussen noted that “operators were restricted by an ETSI ruling.” In fact, there is no such ruling and, anyway, ETSI has no power over operators directly. The only power over operators is their national regulatory authority.
Also in the first paragraph, it is noted that the ETSI two-way standard is four years late. This is not true because it was originally planned for late 1998. The necessary standard should be ready within a year. It is declared in the article that the working group has been involved in political and technical debates. I can assure you that politics has played only a small part in the work while the vast majority of the effort is involved in discussion on technical details. Isn’t this what ETSI should be doing? Who else will check out the quality of the standard ?
The main cause of the delay is correctly pointed out in his next paragraph. There has been a dramatic change in the paging industry, and the coming R&TTE directive has also required a rethink.
To clarify the position with the different codes, it is worthwhile to point out that the original plan was for ETSI to develop a new code that would have been a narrowband CDMA-type system. This system was dropped last year when it became apparent that the effort involved in developing it was too great. In its place, two competing systems have appeared-a Motorola narrowband system, which is a normal FM system; and the Nexus system, which is a frequency-hopping spread spectrum system.
Alex Lax
Chairman
ETSI ERM RP04
