Standards for Standard Setting
WDN calls for a communal song sheet
by Nicki Hayes, August 14, 2002
With a myriad of standards being set by a countless collection of bodies, wireless
application developers can be forgiven for feeling a little dazed. But such confusion
could soon translate into some very real problems unless something is done to make
sure everyone is singing from the same song sheet, reports WDN.
Do you know how many wireless industry standard initiatives are about at the
moment? No, neither do I, but I did spend enough time researching this article to
realize that I needed more time than was efficient to find out. And that got me to
thinking, if I find it overwhelming just to do a headcount for the purpose of a short
opinion piece, how must you wireless application developers, who absolutely need to
keep track of such developments, feel?
‘Confused’, ‘Dazed’, ‘Hysterical,’ ‘Frustrated.’ These are just a few of the responses
I got from a short poll I carried out last week. So, I decided to investigate why the
discipline of standard setting has become such a quagmire in the wireless industry,
working on the assumption that if we know why it’s broken we might be able to fix it.
The cause
It seems to me that the real root of the problem lies in cultural differences between the
world of the internet and the world of telecommunications. Further contributing to the
run-on effects of this is the reluctance of some organizations to adhere to externally
set standards because of competitive interests.
Frank Domoney, a veteran network planning manager with experience gained
working alongside the likes of Vodafone, Hutchison 3G and Nokia Networks agrees.
“The bodies which are setting up standards can be broadly split into two main camps:
The internet camp and the telephone operators camp. The operators have been
building networks for the last 15 years and their culture is towards reliability and
being terribly sure of all the details. For this camp the over-riding motivation behind
standard setting is delivering service reliably to millions of customers and avoiding
network crashes, particularly their pet nightmare of a million crashed handsets that
you can’t re-boot. They’ve seen all the difficulties we’ve had over the last 20 years
with Signalling System 7 and different variants of it and how just setting one
parameter wrongly can sometimes blow away a network,” he advised.
“The alternative group, the internet people however, have a culture of doing things
quickly. They have an iconoclastic attitude where they say let’s write an RFC, publish
it and then see what happens. If nobody complains within the next six months it
becomes a standard. So, what we’re seeing is a lot of people trying to adopt that
approach in the radio business. The Mobile Wireless Internet Forum (MWIF) is
coming from that culture and they’re trying to influence standards and RFCs so they
extend the internet into the mobile domain, whereas the telephone operators belonging
to ETSI or the Operators Harmonization Group (OHG), for example, extend the
mobile domain into the internet. The end result is that the overlap of these two
approaches could confuse the hell out of developers!” he concluded.
The effect
Bruce Jackson, chief technical officer for elata, developers of the service delivery and
subscriber management platform elata senses and a member of both the MIDP Next
Generation Experts Group and the Java Specifications Request Groups (JSR118 and
JSR124), is already witnessing the results of this approach.
“In the area of wireless Java there are already a number of standards generated by
different bodies that have little knock on effects on each other and because there is no
overall governing body responsible for dealing with this in its entirety there’s sure to
be further repercussions,” he advised.
“For example, the MIDP Experts Group is trying to define a series of things that they
wish to achieve in terms of a specification for a Java device. However, it’s perfectly
legal for a vendor, whether that happens to be an operator or a handset vendor, to
extend the platform capabilities within the handset. So long as they’re compliant with
the basic standard, they can extend it in any way they want.
“There’s two ways that has an interesting effect. One is within some of the standards
that have been identified from the WAP Forum’s User Agent Profile (UA profs)
Working Group for detailing the capabilities of a device. The other is within some of
the standards set by the Java Community Expert Group on application provisioning,”
he continued.
“These groups need to work together and share information as each group’s standards
effects the others. At the moment there’s no governing body so these three working
groups have nowhere to go,” he concluded.
And this, apparently, is just one example of problems that stem from the fact that
different working parties are creating standards to address different issues and in
doing so are actually creating knock on effects elsewhere, effects that are being
neither monitored or controlled.
“Further problems are introduced by the fact that original examples of standards being
drafted by the Java Community Process are actually being realized by application
developers involved in various telecoms standards groups which do not require these
standards to be implemented. Then there’s the reluctance of some organizations to
adhere to externally set standards because of competitive interests,” elata’s Jackson
advises.
I asked Domoney whether, through his consultancy service Glencroft, which provides
wireless application developers with an audit service to ensure their products will run
over 3G networks, he has witnessed such problems.
“It’s too early yet but I have no doubt there will be real problems quite soon,
particularly among the various different standards that are being defined for location
based services,” he advised.
The Solution
So, what can be done?
One possible solution is to set up a governing body to oversee all standards. To do so
in a way that suits both cultures would be difficult though, as Jackson explains:
“The internet’s ad hoc approach which never really reaches the level of a standard
works well in its domain. However there is a reason that telecommunications standard
bodies move more slowly, eg, the GSM standard. But not having all standards in one
place is going to cause a problem with emerging technologies and while the W3C
governing body is an extremely good way of changing standards in a rapidly changing
market place, it could not work under the formalized process under which current
bodies work.”
Glencroft’s Domoney not only agrees that it would be difficult, he goes so far as to
say it could be counterproductive.
“We’re not entirely sure whether some of the standards that we’ve written in the past
are still appropriate because standards are a non-tariff barrier to market entry. They
keep out new entrants and people from different trading blocks. It’s standard
economics. But they could also encourage a form of inertia, and, if the established
operators and manufacturers were to take control of a governing standards body (I
don’t think you’d actually ever get a world standards body) they might actually
impede innovation.
“Then, because of the drive, energy and initiative of people in the far east and the US
west coast and elsewhere, that would give more power to the third force - the
Wireless Internet Associations -- which would spring up as dissenting organizations,”
he summarized.
So what are the alternatives?
“Really, probably letting the operators who are the ones who need to get this to work
drive it by a system that’s bought into by the people who are most affected who can
then chose how rigidly they define the standards that are going to apply to devices
that are in their networks is the way to go,” pondered Domoney.
“We certainly don’t want detailed end-to-end standardization as that would give rise
to few products and no competition, but it would be helpful if operators could provide
guidance regarding the amount of creativity developers are allowed to have while
taking into account their request for access to more and more of the underlying
network. That then gives rise to a very exciting, competitive industry,” he concluded.
Indeed, such a role could fall within the remit of the The Operator Harmonization
Group (OHG), however, it seems unrealistic that operators alone could get all the
countless global standards that exist to run together reliably without killing the
application developers’ creativity and initiative.
So, how can we create a communal song sheet? If you’ve got any views email me at
nicki@wirelessdevnet.com before August 20 when I plan to don my waders to revisit this
quagmire in more depth.
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About the author:
Nicki Hayes is The Wireless Developer Network's (www.wirelessdevnet.com) European correspondent and the part-time judge part-time jester of its new online debate -
Holding Court. Nicki also takes on freelance writing and corporate communication projects relating to business to business internet and wireless issues and has
contributed editorial to a number of publications including Unstrung.com, Wireless Business & Technology, Guardian Online, Financial Times, Banking &
Financial Training, eAI Journal and Secure Computing.
About the WirelessDevNet (www.wirelessdevnet.com):
The Wireless Developer Network is an on-line community for information technology
professionals interested in mobile computing and communications. Our mission is to assist
developers, strategists, and managers in bridging the gap between today's desktop and
enterprise applications and tomorrow's mobile users communicating via wireless networks.
We are interested in supporting the deployment of these evolving technologies through
high-quality technical information, news, industry coverage, and commentary. This
information is provided within a true on-line community that supports developer/vendor
dialogue through message boards and user-submitted tips, articles, links, and software
downloads.
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