This is the third in a series of articles in which contributor Stacy Baird presents and in-depth analysis of the role of governments in standards setting initiatives which is released on a bi-weekly basis. For previous instalments see here: Part 1, Part 2 – Editor

PART 3: There are Many Ways in Which the IT Develops Standards: The Most Formal Forums for Standard Setting

The IT industry’s capacity to create interoperability standards is well supported by the fact that there is a veritable alphabet soup of formal forums in which IT and related standards are developed and an equally exhaustive use of the alphabet in IT standards nomenclature. The traditional course for standards development is gaining adoption in voluntary consensus forums most commonly described as national standards bodies (NSBs) and standards development organizations (SDOs). I am not going to go into detail as to the formal processes, suffice it to say they have well established consensus processes and most have an extremely long history of success in setting a wide range of industrial standards.

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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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The Europeans (governments) fund their standards development, China asserts its standards development and the US ignores its standards development. There does not appear, at least to me, to be any information that indicates that one of these approaches has been better than the others. With the exception of GSM (3G) the Europeans have little to show for the government funding of standardization.
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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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On Thursday February 25, Talkstandards hosted a lively open forum on ICT Standardization and eHealth.

Ajit Jaokar spoke of the possibility that eHealth will take off in emerging markets and what the implications thereof could be. As an illustration, Jaokar mentioned the M-Pesa mobile payment service which took off in Kenya, serving 6.5 million subscribers by May 2009
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I have been a member of the Open Web Foundation for some time now. On first impressions, one may wonder: Why do we need yet another Web SSO/standardization body? However, in my view, the Open Web Foundation (OWF) fulfills a key role not currently occupied by other standards bodies so far.

The OWF home page says
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If you have been watching tech and media trends – you cannot miss the rise of 3D (three dimensional)) film (not to be confused with HD i.e. High definition video).

3D is significant because on one hand, the Web is a force that tends to commoditize content (movies, music etc) by changing the business model (a song sold for 99 cents on iTunes). In contrast, 3D offers an opportunity to reverse that trend by creating new sources of revenue.
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The EU Commission´s long expected White Paper on ICT standardization has finally been published. The proposal (“Modernizing ICT Standardization in the EU- The Way Forward”) suggests an update of Council Decision 87/95/EEC which lays down the current EU standardization policy in the field of ICT.
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