BARCELONA—The GSMA kicked off its biggest trade show of the year on Monday with a few announcements, not the least of which was the formation of the Wholesale Applications Community with 24 operators coming together on an open platform for applications.
T-Mobile USA parent Deutsche Telekom, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless are behind the effort. Other operators include América Móvil, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, China Unicom, KT, mobilkom austria group, MTN Group, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Orascom Telecom, Softbank Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor Group, TeliaSonera, SingTel, SK Telecom, VimpelCom, Vodafone and Wind.
All say they are “committed to create an ecosystem for the development and distribution of mobile and Internet applications irrespective of device or technology,” according to a press release. LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson also support the initiative, and GSMA Chief Technical Officer Alex Sinclair says the list is growing, with more companies expressing their desire to be part of it even as the press release announcing its formation was being distributed on Monday.
Time will tell if some of the notables not on the list – such as Nokia, Research In Motion and Google – will join the effort.
The alliance's stated goal is to create a wholesale applications ecosystem that will establish a simple route to market for developers to deliver the applications and services to the widest possible base of customers around the world. In the immediate future, the alliance will seek to unite members' developer communities and create a single, harmonized point of entry to make it easy for developers to join.
The alliance plans to initially use both the JIL and OMTP BONDI requirements, evolving those standards into a common standard within the next 12 months. Ultimately, the plan is to collectively work with the W3C for a common standard based on a converged solution to make sure developers can create applications that port across mobile device platforms and in the future, between fixed and mobile devices.
In other GSMA news, the association formally welcomed new members, including KDDI, China Telecom and Verizon Wireless. While Verizon made big headlines at last year’s Mobile World Congress in announcing its LTE vendors, it was not yet an official member of the GSMA, and CTO Dick Lynch acknowledged during a GSMA press briefing on Monday that the carrier and its choice of CDMA technology for many years were not particularly welcomed with open arms at MWC events.
That’s changed about 360 degrees, as evidenced in the One Voice initiative, which multiple operators are getting behind, including Verizon Wireless. The GSMA is throwing its support toward the effort, which was announced last fall, to create an industry standard way of incorporating voice into LTE, which is a packet-only standard.
In the past, it wasn’t always immediately evident that running voice over LTE would be desirable in relatively short order; 2G and 3G legacy networks were presumed to handle voice. But more players in the ecosystem have come around to seeing it as a necessary part of the package.
Some operators, like NTT DoCoMo, are in a bigger hurry than others to launch an LTE device with voice, according to Dan Warren, GSMA director of technology.
While the industry is still split among factions supporting different ways to get there, Warren says what’s important is that operators agree that, whichever path they take in the interim, they eventually will use a common standard in the form of IMS.
The other two methods, CS Fallback and VoLGA, are expected to have a short window, he says. Most will see the benefit of a single IMS-based solution. “As migratory solutions, as you can imagine a picture of three paths,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how you get there … The entire industry needs to get to one solution as a target.”
The GSMA will lead the development of the specifications that will enable interconnection and international roaming between LTE networks and expects to complete that work by the first quarter of 2011.
The GSMA says its Voice over LTE (VoLTE) initiative has the backing of more than 40 organizations from across the mobile ecosystem, including mobile operators, handset manufacturers and equipment vendors. Right now, T- Mobile International, the main one supporting VoLGA, was noticeably absent from a list of VoLTE supporters.