Role of Standards - Mobile Telephony

In a mobile ecosystem, multiple forces are in play. In this post, I am covering the role of standards in a mobile network, the existing standards and the bodies that define them.  Youngjin Yoo et al, 2005 ( The role of standards in innovation and diffusion of broadband mobile services: The case of South Korea) defines standards as “any written artifacts that enable effective coordination of activities between independent developers, manufacturers or users of telecommunication technologies including manufacturers, operators, service providers and mobile service users”.

In a mobile network, standards occupy an eminent position in the ecosystem. The choice of one for any network has a lot of stake for the organization (s) espousing that standard. Years of R&D, the time, the investment only bears fruit when the technology for that standard gets accepted by the market. For a network based technology like telecom, the gains can be pretty impressive. Putting the money on the right horse can bring dividends for all the stakeholders in the entire value chain -from the companies involved in costly R&D, to the manufacturers of the products, solution, chips and terminals down to the operator who invests in that technology, the implications can be huge.  Global companies invest a respectable percentage of their earnings on R&D. For an operator when he selects a wireless or mobile standard will find it difficult to explain to the shareholders if that technology will have to be discarded without extracting the full life. If we take the example of WiMAX for instance, some global operators had to take a hard call and shift to the more globally accepted standards from the 3GPP family 

(http://www.pcworld.com/article/257700/russian_wimax_pioneer_yota_had_to_turn_on_lte_networks_overnight.html). 

There have been many battles which bruised a lot of players in the game when these fights take place as we have seen in the case of CDMA and GSM or between WiMAX (IEEE) and 3GPP families.

Let us take a look at a typical mobile operator network.  This is a familiar one where several sub- systems make up a mobile network. Each of the sub systems like the Radio network, Core network etc. has to follow some standards for that particular technology when talking within the nodes making up a subsystem or between the different subsystems.. For operators in today’s wireless world these are mainly from the 3GPP or 3GPP2 family of standards. There can be operators who deploy and maintain other wireless networks like WiMAX or combination of technologies like GSM, CDMA and WiFi. The entire network has also got equipment and solutions that call for other standards to be followed. For instance, the transport network. The optical network has developed independently from the 3GPP family and is used extensively not only in mobile networks but in the fixed line and internet networks as well. Again if we look at the IP world, IP is a protocol following the layered architecture, the standards which are driven by the computer or IT bodies like IETF. They come up with various RFCs as we know them.  

Schematic is on a high level and depicts different parts of a Mobile Network. Does not show actual connectivity between sub- systems

For instance, 1. GSM on Radio Access connects to Circuit Core for voice and Packet Core for Data.; 2. LTE on Radio Access does not connect to Circuit Core but to Packet Core & IMS on Core Network

For a mobile network to work end to end, all these different standards need to work in tandem. The good part is that a mobile network following the 3GPP family has nodes and technologies which work seamlessly with other technologies. These standards are developed by multitude of standard bodies -ITU-T, IEEE, OMA, GSMA, IETF and the like.  I have tried to compile the chart below (Source: 3gpp.org; 3gpp2.org; itu.int; gsma.com; ietf.org; openmobilealliance.org; ieee.org) showing the main network sub-systems and the standards to show the intermingling of different hues. 

This inter-working of standards in mobile network helps to give a seamless experience to an end user who does not care to know what lies underneath the voice call he makes to talk to a friend or generate data that is consumed while accessing the net.  In a subsequent post, I will try to cover the standards and the bodies that are working on upcoming areas like IOT, Cloud, Virtualization and Smart cities.  But to do that, an understanding of existing standards gives a background on where we stand today which I have attempted to capture in this post.