Welcome to the revised, new look, week in standards. Once again we will cover the latest developments in the world of standards each week, trying to keep the ideas as concise as possible so as to cover as many developments as possible.  It is indeed surprising how quickly standards can evolve in just a week and we look forward to engaging with you and welcome your feedback.
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Last week it was announced that in the US, as of February, the iPhone exclusivity deal with network provider AT&T will end and the iPhone will be made available through Verizon, the second largest American network.
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As the third generation of wireless mobile networks reaches the end of its development and the next generation looms on the horizon, the term 4G is being increasing thrown around as the latest buzz work for the mobile industry.

Technically speaking, no network or device commercially available as of writing can truly be described as 4G. The radio-communication division of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) defines 4G, or IMT-Advanced, compliant technology as being capable, among other key features, of data rates in excess of “100 Mbit/s for high and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility” systems. However, with the progress of the industry as it is, the strict definition of the term seems to be in danger of irrelevance.
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While a lot of attention has been placed on the growing standards war for next generation wireless network standards between LTE and WiMAX – for instance see here and here – a number of interesting developments have been made regarding the Chinese developed outsider TD-LTE.

TD-LTE is a standard for wireless mobile networks and 4G candidate which has been developed by China Mobile, building upon the TD-SCDMA 3G standard. The TD-LTE stems from China’s indigenous innovation policy which seeks to reduce China’s reliance upon foreign IPR by supporting the use of domestic alternatives. (Don’t miss the upcoming Talkstandards open forum for further discussion on China’s standards policy).
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Last week, I was in Amsterdam as a speaker/analyst at the LTE world series in Amsterdam which is a top Telecoms conference especially for the Operator community. LTE is about ‘Beyond 3G’ networks and that’s an area with lots of standardization discussions (see here and here). At Amsterdam, there were two relevant themes for TalkStandards. I will cover one here (Voice standardization in 4G networks) and I will create a separate post for the other (IPR issues for 4G networks).

There is an informal joke in Telecoms circles which goes like this: When we created 3G we forgot about data, when we created 4G we forgot about voice!

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The industry backed LTE 4G standard is poised to be a great contender to the existing WiMAX technology. While a few countries have already started rolling out LTE networks, and many more are in the starting blocks, Australia have decided to not follow this development.
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Next week the 3GPP will host the LTE world summit in the Netherlands. The conference focuses on the 3GPP’s (3rd Generation Partnership Project) LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard for next generation mobile telecommunications networks. LTE is the main competitor to the WiMAX standard, both of which are branded as 4G mobile network standards, and is capable of speeds up to 100Mbit/s downloads and 50Mbits/s uploads wirelessly.
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In December last year two wireless mobile networks, compliant with the LTE next generation mobile network standard (see the previous blog post here), were rolled out in the Scandinavian capitals Stockholm and Oslo by network provider TeliaSonera. While the LTE standard, which offers considerably faster connection speeds relative to the current 3G technologies, is widely backed by Governments and Network Providers, the TeliaSonera networks were the world’s first publically available networks utilizing the new technology and market a significant mile stone for the new technology.
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Recently, I have been thinking that We need to innovate standards but not standardize innovation.
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