Article re-printed with kind permission from GSM Q, March 2001 Issue 19

Alan Hadden, president, GSA - the Global mobile Suppliers Association

Achieving genuine interoperability between standards is an obvious objective, but can be a little tricky to accomplish when the goalposts are far from stable. That being said, considerable advances have been made in recent months towards pinning down the standards that are needed within a fully-fledged 3G wireless environment. In November 2000, the most recent 3GPP Market Representation Partners meeting - comprising the GSA, GSM Association, IPv6 Forum, MWIF, UWCC, 3G.IP and UMTS Forum - tied down a series of cornerstone issues, with the aim to push forward with collaborative standards-making at the global level.

We have a clear roadmap for the transitional stages, moving from 2G to full 3G, and a significant momentum has been built up. The challenge now is to maintain that momentum without faltering along the way. The vision of 3G is as a service and application-driven wireless environment, and its success will rely on it being a genuinely open mobile platform. This in turn rests on complete interoperability being achieved--including the protection of previous network investment by operators-in order to deliver on the latest potential that 3G offers.

So, just what are we facing en route to a fully interoperable wireless world? We need to see heterogeneous networks that are based on different standards interworking happily together and seamlessly supporting the free-flowing exchange of dynamic content and comprehensive session management. Unrestricted roaming and service portability is a must, with handsets performing to the highest quality standards irrespective of location. This pre-supposes multi-standard technologies that are capable of supporting transparent service continuity. A stable mobile data backbone structure, together with high-speed wireless Intemet connections, is a prerequisite, as is dealing effectively with the issues surrounding the air interface and switch-to-switch communications. The result of this transition will be a move away from today's more vertical network models into flexible, layered network concepts, incorporating a new set of business models and cross-industry co-operation.

Much has already been achieved, giving us grounds for considerable optimism:

-		we have now seen the specification of multi-mode terminals capable of supporting GSM, EDGE, and WCDMA operation
-		the Universal Wireless Communications Consortium (UWCC) for TDMA and the North American GSM Alliance for GSM recognised a need to join forces back in 1999, forming a team to specify the desired interoperability between these technologies. This group - the GSM/ANSI-136 Interoperability Team (GAIT) - has been focusing on the specification of a multimode mobile station and a network interworking function to translate between the two network protocols (GSM MAP and ANSI-41). It has published four technical specifications to date
-		the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a key contributor, with a growing number of manufacturers announcing interoperability testing in compliance with 3GPP standards
-		under the aegis of 3GPP the Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) and GERAN standards (a GSM- and EDGE-based 200KHz radio access network) are being developed to guarantee interoperability, representing the ongoing development of the GSM standard
-		the WCDMA standard was designed from the outset to be deployed alongside GSM, whilst the GSM standard was duly modified to support interworking with WCDMA
-		in January 2001, it was announced that the UWCC is to include TDMA interoperability with GSM as a core component of the GSM Global Roaming Forum, bringing the GAIT programme under this same umbrella.

The first steps en route to interoperability have been taken, and we have a much clearer vision of where we are going. The task ahead is one of focusing on bridging the many gaps that still exist and of moving the industry forwards as quickly as possible to a wireless environment that will do exactly what its customers decide they want by overcoming boundaries at every level.

Alan Hadden, president GSA

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