Wireless telephony systems are here to stay in a big way, unlike some other wireless technologies, which are on the drawing board and may never turn into viable commercial products and services. Investment in the wireless telephony industry is at $50.1 billion in capital investments and $20 billion in spectrum auction fees in the US. There are more than 60 million wireless subscribers in the US now, and the average monthly bill per user was at just below $40 in 1998. It is anticipated that there will be 170 million wireless users in the US by 2007; that’s more than 50% of the population.
The purpose of this subsection is to help identify a NIST role in this important area of information technology. Since the NIST role will be mainly in the terrestrial 3G systems, and it is an accepted fact that the ITU process will result in at least two standards (one for terrestrial and one for satellite systems), we concentrate on terrestrial 3G systems in the rest of this section. At the time of writing of this report, and within eleven months of the completion of the IMT-2000 standard, it is not clear at all whether a single, global standard for terrestrial wireless communication systems will emerge at the end of the ITU standardization effort. There are three major obstacles that have to be removed before there can be such a standard. The 16th Meeting of ITU-R TG8/1 in Brazil in March 1999 will determine how likely it is that these obstacles will be removed, and a single international terrestrial standard for 3G wireless systems developed by the end of 1999. Each of the major obstacles is discussed below.
1. Manufacturers’ Interest: An IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) conflict between Qualcomm and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has been in the news for the past several months. Qualcomm is the major force behind TIA’s cdma2000 proposal, and ETSI is the sponsor of the W-CDMA proposal backed by all the European countries. They are both based on wideband CDMA technology, where Ericsson and Qualcomm each have a number of patents. Although the best technical solution would need both sets of patents, it appears that the two camps are trying to find ways around each other's IPR. This would not result in the best technical solution. In summary, each manufacturer’s interest is to influence the development of the IMT-2000 standard so that it is based on as much IPR from that manufacturer as possible. Naturally, this leads to a conflict of interest.
2. Operators’ Interest: Each major operator providing cellular service has invested hundreds of million dollars in its present network and infrastructure. Each would like to see an IMT-2000 standard that is backward compatible to the secondgeneration (2G) technology they presently use. By backward compatible, we mean a system where an operator can use its existing network infrastructure as much as possible and where 2G and 3G systems can co-exist in a dual-mode handset (mobile terminal).
One can have a dual-mode phone that would support GSM and UTRA (this is what GSM operators, ETSI and the European countries wish to have), a dual-mode phone that would support IS-95 and cdma2000 (this is what IS-95 operators and Qualcomm wish to have), or a dual-phone that would support 2G TDMA technology (such as IS-136) and UWC- 136 (this is what an operator like Bell South likes to see happen). If a single standard is adopted, then many operators would have to spend a lot of money to change their systems, and this may just be too much for many of them to bear. Dual-mode phones are needed, because there will be a transition period where systems based on both 2G and 3G technologies will be operational. Of course, one can also think of multi-mode phones supporting more than two systems, but that would even further increase the price of the phones.
3. Spectrum Availability: One important promise of IMT-2000 is global roaming, and this requires availability of a single, sizable frequency band in all countries around the world. This is a major challenge, because spectrum allocations in different countries are different, and it is difficult to free up some frequency band that has already been allocated for other usage. For example, in the US, the FCC has auctioned some parts of the frequency spectrum. It is not possible to force the license holders to make their part of the spectrum available for IMT-2000 systems. The only remaining options are two. Would the license holders be willing to voluntarily use the spectrum for IMT-2000 systems? Would the license holders be willing to sell their licenses to service providers that wish to offer IMT-2000 services?
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