Tài liệu GSM and UMTS (P2) pdf

Chapter 2: The Agreement on the Concepts and the Basic Parameters of the GSM Standard (mid-1982 to mid-1987) Section 1: The Market Fragmentation in Europe and the CEPT Initiatives in 1982 Thomas Haug 1 2.1.1 The Situation in the Early 1980s: A Spectrum Allocation Opens the Possibility to Overcome the European Patchwork of Incompatible Systems At the World Administrative Radio Conference in 1979 (WARC ’79), a decision was taken to set aside a block of radio spectrum in the 900 MHz range for use in land mobile commu- nication systems in Zone 1, which in the terminology of the Radio Regulations means Europe. Beyond this, little was said about how the spectrum should be used, such as the allocation to public systems versus private ones. The European telecommunications market was for a long time badly fragmented. In an attempt to improve the situation, the organisation of 26 PTT Administrations of Western Europe and a few other countries (Confe ´ rence Europe ´ enne des Postes et Te ´ le ´ communica- tions, abbreviated (CEPT)) was since 1959 actively engaged in standardisation of telecom- munications, but the progress was often hampered by differences in policy in the member countries. It is, however, of interest to note that contrary to what is often assumed by observers outside the PTTs, CEPT was not at all a purely regulatory body, but dealt exten- sively with technical issues in many fields and had for that purpose set up a large number of working groups. (In 1989, the technical specification work was transferred to the then newly created European Telecommunication Specification Institute (ETSI).) Around 1980 the European situation in mobile communications was that a number of mutually incompatible mobile systems were in operation or in preparation. The lack of 1 The views expressed in this sectiom are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of his affiliation entity. GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication Edited by Friedhelm Hillebrand Copyright q 2001 John Wiley & Sons Ltd ISBNs: 0-470-84322-5 (Hardback); 0-470-845546 (Electronic) compatibility led to other problems, such as small market segments, small number of users in most systems, high terminal cost and high subscription fees. Consequently, mobile commu- nications was seen as ‘‘ the rich man’s toy’’ in many countries. The idea of one standardised system, capable of being used throughout a large part of Europe, such as the CEPT member countries, had never really caught on among the authorities. Unfortunately, the entire tele- communications field had often been used as an instrument for protecting the national manu- facturing and operating companies, a fact which had led to a situation where each country more or less had its own telecom standard, incompatible with the standards in other countries. The effect of this policy was no exception from the general rule that implementation of protectionist policies at the expense of standardisation leads to a loss of the economy-of- scale benefits, a loss borne by but not always directly observable by the user. In the field of mobile communications, however, (as opposed to standards in the fixed network), interna- tional standardisation would in addition to the economy-of-scale benefits offer a benefit which would be directly observable by the user, i.e. the ability to use one’s own equipment when moving around in foreign networks. This feature was not implemented in any network except the Nordic NMT system, opened in 1981, which allowed users in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (later expanded to the Netherlands and Switzerland) to use their terminals in the countries where the NMT system was installed, and in the German Network B, which was built in the Benelux countries and Austria. In general, however, the political and regulatory difficulties concerning use of radio equipment in foreign countries were very much against creating a Pan-European system which could be used when travelling abroad. 2.1.2 Vienna Meeting of CEPT Telecommunications Commission (COM-T) in 1982 The NMT network was only in the start-up phase when the Netherlands presented a proposal 2 at the meeting of the CEPT Telecommunications Commission in Vienna in June 1982. The proposal pointed out that unless a concerted action to work out plans for a common European system was started very soon, there would be a serious risk that the 900 MHz band would be taken into use for various incompatible systems of many kinds in Europe. The last chance to build a Pan-European system in the 20th Century would then be lost, since there would be no sufficiently wide spectrum available below 1 GHZ, i.e. in a part of the radio spectrum which could be considered suitable for mobile communications, given the state of the technology in 1982. The Nordic Administrations had recently put the 450 MHz NMT system into operation and there were already indications that a large number of users would be interested in the feature of international roaming, a new feature at that time. In addition, a common standard would obviously result in considerable economic gains. To build a new European network along these lines had been discussed by the Nordic Administrations, which therefore strongly supported the Dutch point of view and proposed 3 that the total responsibility for progress and co-ordination of the specification task for a new Pan-European system should be left to a group of experts. The CEPT Telecommunications Commission accepted this proposal and decided to start a new study question, entitled ‘‘ Harmonisation of the technical and operational characteristics GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication12 2 GSM Doc 3/82 and GSM Doc 5/82. 3 GSM Doc 4/82. of a public mobile communications system in the 900 MHz band’’ . Rather than setting up a new committee, reporting directly to the Com-T according to the proposal, however, it was decided to entrust the Committee for Co-ordination of Harmonisation (CCH) with the task of setting up a Special Group for the purpose of studying the question 4 and the Swedish offer of making Thomas Haug available for the chairmanship of the group was accepted. (I was a bit surprised when I heard this, since nobody had asked me in advance.) In line with the CEPT naming rules, the new group was given the name Groupe Spe ´ cial Mobile, GSM for short. 2.1.3 The Com-T Decision and its Consequences The decision taken by the CEPT Telecommunication Commission was very vague, and in effect left it to the new group to propose its own terms of reference. Representatives of the Netherlands and the Nordic Administrations therefore met during the summer of 1982 in order to write a proposal for an Action Plan, which was subsequently presented to CCH for approval in November of that year. That document 5 was approved and was used as the basis for the work of GSM for a long time, with a mainly editorial updating of Section 3 in 1985 6 . The decision only mentioned ‘‘ harmonisation’’ , which indicates that the compatibility aspect was the dominating factor behind the decision, and there is considerable doubt that the delegates at the CEPT Telecommunications Commission meeting believed that free circulation of radio users across international borders could be achieved within the foresee- able future, given the formidable obstacles that existed. It was clear, anyway, that many more aspects than the mere harmonisation had to be given great attention if the goal of creating a Pan-European service, acceptable to the broad European public, was to be reached. When the above mentioned proposal for an Action Plan was presented by the newly appointed GSM Chairman to CCH in November 1982, it was therefore stressed that the goal envisaged in the decision taken by the CEPT Telecom- munications Commission in Vienna, according to which the work should be completed by the end of 1996, could not be met if major new developments were to be taken into consideration. A ‘‘ harmonisation’’ of mobile communication systems would mainly consist of specifying a system according to the techniques already established, in other words an analogue system. It was therefore proposed to the CCH that by the end of 1986, only an outline specification comprising the basic system parameters for the various parts of the system and their interfaces should be finalised. Furthermore, it was proposed that at the same time, technical specifica- tions should be established for the system as a whole, to the point of guaranteeing compat- ibility. They should comprise the main building blocks of the system, which then were understood to be the switching centre, the base station, the mobile station and the man– machine interface. The proposal was accepted by the CCH and subsequently by the CEPT Telecommunications Commission. In retrospect, I think that it was a very wise decision which was taken when the aim was changed to present just an outline specification, not a final, detailed one, by the end of 1986. Had that not been done, we would probably have been stuck with an analogue system today, based on somewhat modified versions of the technical solutions that existed in the early Chapter 2: The Agreement on the Concepts and Parameters of the GSM Standard 13 4 GSM Doc 1/82. 5 Doc T/CCH (82) 21 R, later renamed GSM Doc 2/82. 6 GSM Doc 73/85. 1980s. That system would have been unable to fulfil many of the requirements now placed on the GSM system. In the CCH meeting in November 1982, there was a fairly long discussion on whether GSM should also be mandated to study the possibility of an interim system which would meet the needs until the new GSM system could be put into operation. Such ideas had been presented at the CEPT Telecommunications Commission meeting and several countries felt a need for such a system. In particular Dr Klaus Spindler of the Deutsche Bundespost warned against spending time and resources on an interim system, and in the end CCH decided that the resources available to GSM should be concentrated on the new system since work on an interim system would be a waste of time. Seeing afterwards how much work there was to be done on the new system, this was undoubtedly the right decision. 2.1.4 Basic Requirements for the New System The essential contents of the Basic Requirements in the Study Plan of 1982 are given below. † The system must be able to operate in the entire frequency bands 890–915 and 935–960 MHz. † Co-existence with the already existing systems in the 900 MHz band must be guaranteed. † The GSM mobile stations must be able to operate in all participating countries, preferably all CEPT countries. † Services other than speech will be required in the new system. Since there is uncertainty about those services, however, a modular system structure allowing for a maximum of flexibility will be required. In order to reach this goal, the same philosophy as for ISDN and OSI should be applied, and standards for protocols, etc. should as far as practicable seek to obtain compatibility with such developments. † High spectrum efficiency and state-of-the-art subscriber facilities must be achieved. † The same facilities as those offered in the public switched telephone and data networks should be available in the mobile system. † An identification plan, compatible with the numbering plan and routing possibilities in the PSTN and PSDN, must be worked out. † The system must be capable of providing for handheld mobile stations. † The demand for voice security (encryption) must be taken into account. † No significant modification of the fixed national telephone networks must be necessary. † The system must allow the participating countries to maintain their existing charging systems. † An internationally standardised signalling system must be used for interconnection of the switching centres. The influence of the NMT principles from 1971 in this set of requirements is obvious to anyone familiar with that system. Furthermore, an action plan was prepared, listing the various other bodies in and outside CEPT with whom the GSM should stay in contact in order to avoid repeating work that was already being done. GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication14 Chapter 2: The Agreement on the Concepts and the Basic Parameters of the GSM Standard (mid-1982 to mid-1987) Section 2: The GSM Standardisation Work 1982–1987 Thomas Haug 1 2.2.1 The Start of the Work The first meeting of the new Groupe Spe ´ cial Mobile (GSM) was held in Stockholm in December 1982. 2 The interest in this new activity was great, as can be seen from the fact that no less than 31 delegates from 11 CEPT Administrations participated. The starting points for the various administrations were very different. Some countries had First Generation systems in operation while other countries had none, and most of those systems were different from each other in one way or another as was mentioned earlier. A certain amount of operational experience was available from those systems, but it was agreed that much of it would not be applicable. The meeting discussed at length the spectrum situation in the CEPT countries, and there was a great concern that it might prove impossible to avoid using the 900 MHz band for other purposes for such a long time as envisaged in the work plan for GSM. The pressure for spectrum was just too great, and there was a clear risk that allocating parts of the spectrum to other systems might become a serious threat to the future Pan-European system. Another issue which was taken up at the first meeting was the question of free circulation of users. The idea of free international roaming was very much in line with the views of the delegates, but the existing restrictions in most European countries on the use of radio equip- ment by foreign visitors would clearly be a serious obstacle to the system since free circula- tion was one of the great advantages in the standardisation process. A French contribution 3 to the meeting pointed out that this was a purely political question which would not present very 1 The views expressed in this module are those of the autor and do not necessarily reflect the views of his affiliation entity. 2 Meeting report of GSM#1 in folder A1 of the attached CD ROM. 3 GSM Doc 8/82. GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication Edited by Friedhelm Hillebrand Copyright q 2001 John Wiley & Sons Ltd ISBNs: 0-470-84322-5 (Hardback); 0-470-845546 (Electronic) difficult technical problems once the political issues had been cleared. As this question was already under study by the R 21 working group, there was no immediate need for GSM to take any action beyond following the studies in R 21. However, the group agreed that elimination of those obstacles as far as possible would have to be one of the key goals of the work. 2.2.2 Work Rules and Working Language(s) The written and unwritten work rules of CEPT were quite different from those generally used in purely national bodies, but this fact caused very little trouble. It was understood that we had to work on the basis of consensus, so there would be no voting. This principle may not be the speediest way to reach a decision, but on the other hand, a consensus makes it almost certain that everyone is going to stick to the decision. Another rule which was to prove important for the working conditions of the group but which had nothing to do with the technical problems, was the issue of working language. It was specified by CEPT that committees and working groups (but not their subgroups) would have three official languages, English, French and German, with simultaneous translation. I thought from the start that it would be necessary to make English the only working language in GSM, even if that would violate the CEPT rules. There were several reasons for this approach. Firstly, in the mobile telecommunication field (as opposed to e.g. the political field), it could safely be assumed that just about everybody would have a reasonably good command of the English language, at least good enough to communicate more efficiently than through interpreters who would have no idea about the technical field we were to discuss. Secondly, it would be far easier to arrange meetings without all the equipment and personnel required for simultaneous trans- lation in three languages, and I expected that there would be a lot of meetings. Thirdly, there would inevitably be a large number of points in the specifications on which we would have to make precise definitions, and to carry on discussions of definitions through inter- preters would be very awkward, to say the least. I did not expect this to go unchallenged (despite the fact that it was tacitly accepted by the delegates), and before meetings 1 and 2 there were official objections from some administrations which felt that simultaneous translation would be necessary in order to make things easier for all delegates. The GSM delegates themselves found that the principle of one language worked very well, however. The French and German delegates were not allowed by their administrations to agree to a permanent change in the CEPT working procedures, but they could accept an exception for any particular meeting. After a few years the issue resurfaced because of some decisions in the CEPT to make multi-language working mandatory. A compromise solution was found with the help of some GSM delegates who informed their superiors that the work in the group went very well with just one language and that the work would actually be hampered if the group was forced to use several languages. The solution was that the chairman was to ask GSM at the end of each meeting if simultaneous translation in the next meeting was required. If nobody demanded translation, one language would suffice. This was done, and since nobody ever asked for translation the whole issue was quietly dropped after some time. I am convinced that the single language mode of operation was of great value for creating an environment which enabled us to work very informally and efficiently. GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication16 2.2.3 Political Direction During the first few meetings of GSM, there was a great deal of uncertainty as to what course to pursue and what would be politically possible. Since the superior bodies in CEPT had given no directive as to the choice of an analogue or digital solution, it was obviously up to GSM itself to propose a solution. Clearly, an analogue system would be quite straightforward, offering no really difficult problems. A proposal for a digital system, however, would in order to convince the operators and the manufacturers, have to be based on compelling arguments showing the advantages in choosing a technology which had never been tried before in terrestrial public mobile communications. Moreover, any new analogue system would not have represented a sufficient breakthrough from the already existing systems such as NMT and AMPS to justify its adoption by the market. Thus, it was natural that the focus of the studies would be on a thorough investigation of the characteristics of the digital solution. Regardless of whether the future system would be analogue or digital, some assumptions had to be made for testing the technical solutions, one of them would be a traffic model. Thus, a traffic model was a very important issue during the first year of the group. In retrospect, of course, those traffic figures look almost ridiculously low today. 2.2.4 Co-operation with other Groups in CEPT and other European Bodies The goals described in GSM Doc 2/82 were, as someone said, ‘‘ a tall order’’ which involved far more work than could be managed within GSM alone, so it was necessary to enlist the assistance of a number of other bodies. Within CEPT, there were working groups, active in fields of interest to GSM, e.g. data transmission, signalling, services and facilities and also groups dealing with commercial issues such as tariff harmonisation, etc. In addition to CEPT groups, there were bodies set up in co-operation with the EEC, such as the COST groups, which were studying wave propagation, modulation techniques, etc, and we were to liase with some industrial groups like EUCATEL. Also, it was felt necessary to follow the develop- ments in certain fields which were not covered by other CEPT or COST groups, but which were nonetheless considered to be important to the future mobile system. An example is the field of radiation hazards, an issue which since the early 1980s had attracted great interest after some results had been published in a Soviet journal. The hazards – perceived or real – in the use of mobile telephones would no doubt be a potential threat to the entire field of mobile communications, so the results had to be studied. The GSM group obviously had no resources to pursue this matter, so a rapporteur was appointed to follow what was being published on this question. However, it was found after some years that the results were very inconclusive, so we dropped the question. As far as I can see, the issue regarding the radiation hazards to the user of mobile handsets is still (January 2001) open, but there is concern in many areas and several bodies are dealing with all aspects of this issue. One final point must be mentioned here. The contacts with the Quadri-partite group, which have been described by Philippe Dupuis in his chapter (Chapter 2, Section 3), were of great value to us in the critical decision-making period, since they helped us develop a common strategy. Our contacts with the group were not of the formal kind, of course, but much more efficient since so many Quadri-partite delegates were also delegates to GSM meetings. Chapter 2: The Agreement on the Concepts and Parameters of the GSM Standard 17 2.2.5 The Advent of Competition During the late 1970s, a political factor became noticeable which would gradually turn out to be very important, namely the pressure in many countries (starting in the US) for the intro- duction of competition in the telecom field. Traditionally, the European telecom operators had always been state monopolies, but in 1982, the UK government decided to open the field of mobile communications for competition. The first system to be used this way would be TACS, a modified version of the AMPS system used in the US. Today, when there is competition in the telecom field in most countries, it is a bit strange to read the discussions of the early 1980s with predictions of the dire consequences of competition in telecommu- nications. Human nature is such that when a novel feature with political implications is proposed, there is usually a great deal of resistance from those who feel threatened and there is no doubt that most PTTs were very much against the competition and they did not do much to promote it. In this context, it is interesting to read the description of some of the features in the then tentatively specified TACS system (report of meeting number 2, p. 5 4 ) where it is rather optimistically said that there will be ‘‘ automatic handover between compet- ing companies’’ . That feature was considered to be of vital importance for the spectrum economy, and it was thought by the UK authorities that it would be easy to implement as indeed it probably would, technically. For many years, however, automatic handover between competing operators in the same country was not implemented anywhere, since the operators resisted the idea of accepting subscribers from a competitor. (Lately, an agree- ment has been worked out in Germany between the T-Mobil network and Viag Interkom for national roaming between the networks without any pressure from the regulator.) In compar- ison, handover agreements between companies in different countries, i.e. in a non-competi- tive situation, have normally caused very little difficulty, although the national and the international roaming features are technically quite similar. 2.2.6 The Creation of Working Parties and a Permanent Nucleus in GSM Gradually, the workload increased and it became clear that it was no longer possible to deal with all issues in the plenary, so GSM decided to set up three ad-hoc working parties, namely WP 1 for services and facilities, WP 2 for radio questions and WP 3 for network aspects, mainly in order to prepare proposals for the plenary. The WPs were intended for that meeting alone, but as might be expected, they had to continue during several meetings as the workload increased. The CCH was anxious to prevent the proliferation of groups and decided that the WPs should not meet outside the ordinary meetings of GSM. However, after some time it became obvious that the workload made it necessary for the WPs to meet between the GSM meetings, and in 1985, the CCH accepted this. In addition, it became obvious that there was a need for a body working on a permanent basis in order to take care of the co-ordination of the WPs, issuing documents and many other tasks that were difficult to handle for groups that only met at intervals of several months. The solution to this problem was to set up a Permanent Nucleus (PN) whose Terms of Reference are given in Doc 126/85, which after lengthy discussions between the CEPT Administrations concerning the location of the new body was set up in Paris and started operations in June, 1986 with Bernard Mallinder of BT as co-ordinator. Many of the countries which participated GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication18 4 Meeting report of GSM#2 in folder A1 of the attached CD ROM. in the GSM work contributed to the work of the PN. The use of a PN is not uncommon in international co-operation, of course, but this case was somewhat unusual in the sense that GSM already had its very strong WPs 1, 2 and 3, a fact which to some extent might limit the authority of the PN. Thus, one of the tasks of the PN was to assist the WPs in their work by supporting them with Program Managers. The burden of seconding skilled engineers to the PN would be totally borne by the PTTs themselves (later even the manufacturers), and the PN was to be hosted by the French Administration which (in addition to manpower seconded to the technical work of GSM) supplied the premises, secretarial assistance and telecommuni- cation facilities. Thus, we never dealt with support in terms of money, a fact which relieved us of the tedious work with budgets, accounting. etc. 2.2.7 Co-operation with the European Commission and with Manufacturers The European Commission had indicated their willingness to support the activity financially, but the PTTs found that it would be better for them to carry that burden themselves. By and large the contacts between GSM and the European Commission were relatively few, since the PTTs had sufficient resources to deal with the technical problems that arose. It was also my personal conviction, based on the experience from the NMT work, that despite the criticism for slowness often raised against CEPT, the PTTs were perfectly capable of carrying the project through. I was for that reason reluctant to accept EEC intervention in the work. On the political level, however, there were many contacts, and one contribution by the EEC was going to be of fundamental importance for the future of the GSM system. That was when the Frequency Directive was approved, reserving the GSM frequency spectrum for use by that system. This action stopped any attempts, not only in the EEC countries but also in many countries bordering on the EEC area, to use the spectrum for other purposes and it thereby made the success of the system possible. On several occasions, there was pressure from the outside world to speed up the work so as to prepare the detailed specifications earlier than decided. Understandably, the manufacturing industries were concerned about a late delivery of the specifications, since they knew how much time they would need to implement the system. This question was to crop up several times during the mid-1980s and had to be discussed by GSM, but the result always was that it would not be possible to advance the starting date of the system, but preliminary specifica- tions might be produced. After the creation of ETSI, this question became of less importance since there was then far more openness in the way GSM worked and hence, the manufacturers were well informed about the progress of the work. 2.2.8 Co-operation with non-European Bodies The thought of spreading GSM to non-European countries was hardly in the minds of anyone in the early days. However, some ideas of co-operation with non-European bodies emerged now and then. For instance, there was a proposal from Bellcore 5 in late 1984 for co-operation, but CCH turned it down. The idea was discussed again in the Berlin meeting in October 1985, when delegates from Bellcore visited GSM for a discussion, but it was found that the difference in time plans and ideas was too great. Also, there was a discussion in early Chapter 2: The Agreement on the Concepts and Parameters of the GSM Standard 19 5 GSM Doc 72/84. 1986 on whether co-operation should be sought with a Working Party (IWP 8/13) in CCIR in order to find a way to launch GSM as a world standard. The conclusion of that discussion was that GSM must not in any circumstances allow its time schedule to be affected, and the conclusion was that although contacts with IWP 8/13 would be useful in order to spread information about the GSM system, something which could easily be achieved since many GSM delegates also took part in the CCIR meetings, the different time schedules of the two fora made it unrealistic to aim for acceptance of GSM in IWP 8/13. 2.2.9 Other Important Issues The question of IPRs emerged early in the work of GSM. The first occurrence was probably when it was found that some areas, above all speech coding, were loaded with patents. In 1985 this question was brought to the attention of CCH, which stated that the policy of CEPT was to avoid standardising a feature or a method which was not freely available without royalties. On two points, GSM succeeded in securing royalty free agreements with the holders of two patents, i.e. the speech encoder and the Voice Activity Detector. Apart from those cases, the IPR issue was going to cause a lot of difficulties in the work on the new Pan- European system. After 1988, the question was taken over by the MoU, and the ensuing struggle is described in Stephen Temple’s chapter on that body (Chapter 2, Section 4). Among the required features of the system was the ability to protect the transmitted speech. Therefore, after discussions with the CEPT group on data transmission, it was decided to set up an expert group on security issues (SEG), which started working in May 1985, chaired by the GSM Chairman. It worked out basic protocols for authentication and for protection of speech, location and subscriber identity, which were presented in 1988 and subsequently accepted as GSM standards 6 . Among the results of the work of this group was the first specification of the subscriber identity module (SIM), a kind of smart card. The SIM was to perform a number of functions, not only those which concerned the identity of the subscri- ber, but also several important functions concerning the protection of the information, subscriber and network operator data, etc. The SEG also initiated a subgroup, the Algorithm Experts Group (AEG), which worked in great secrecy because of the sensitive nature of the material. The other parts of the SEG were in 1988 converted into the SIM Experts Group (SIMEG) in order to prepare specifications in co-operation with the manufacturers. 2.2.10. Choice of Speech Codec, Access Method and Modulation The crucial issue during the first 5 years of the GSM work was the question concerning the choice of access and modulation system, a question which as described earlier was not decided by CEPT in 1982. The tests of the various proposals, eight in total, were performed in Paris by CNET assisted by the PN in late 1986 as described by Philippe Dupuis in his section about the tripartite and quadripartite activity (Chapter 2, Section 3), and the results were presented to GSM for discussion and decision in February 1987 in Funchal, Madeira. That meeting, which coincidentally happened to bear the ominous number 13 in the series of GSM meetings, turned out to be a very difficult meeting and very different from all the other GSM meetings before and after. The reason for this was that it concerned the choice of technology in an area where many countries had been very active and had invested a lot of GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication20 6 GSM Specs. 02.09 and 03.20 (see attached CD ROM folder A3). [...]... the Concepts and Parameters of the GSM Standard 43 One significant difference between the GSM technology and the alternative US technical standards of the time was that the US digital cellular standards were only radio interfaces GSM was both a radio interface and a well-defined intelligent network sitting behind it This was a reflection of the different standards making structures in the US and Europe... Silberhorn and an Alcatel delegation (France and Germany) led by Philippe Glotin After an intensive discussion the French and German teams confirmed their view, that 32 GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication narrowband TDMA is superior to the broadband solution considering technical, operational and economic criteria The two Director Generals of telecommunication, Marcel Roulet and Waldemar... both DGT and the Bundespost started considering abandoning the project to implement an interim 900 MHz solution and wait for the 900 MHz European digital standard elaborated by the GSM Both had developed solutions for the limited spectrum available to them in the 400 MHz band, Radiocom 2000 in France and system C in Germany and could attempt to boost their capacity Both realised also that the GSM group... of the Franco-German programme was to test different radio techniques and that both projects were based on widely 6 Meeting report of GSM# 6 section 8 in the attached CD ROM folder A1, document GSM 76/84 submitted by France and Germany in Folder A2 A progress report with more details was given to GSM# 7 (document GSM 6/ 85) GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication 28 different technical... discussed in the GSM group The four Nordic countries had done so since the creation of the GSM and this certainly had had a positive impact on the GSM decision making process An instance in which the quadripartite co-ordination helped to achieve a decision is the 10 GSM 10/85 Chapter 2: The Agreement on the Concepts and Parameters of the GSM Standard 31 location of the Permanent Nucleus of the GSM, i.e the... would be more and more difficult as time went by 7 GSM Doc 21/87 and GSM 22/87 22 GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication This was a big step forward The meeting could, based on the principle described above, agree on a final report 8 concerning the technical standard for a Pan-European digital cellular radio system, which describes the unanimous decision on a TDMA system and the 13 to... technology 38 GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication 2.4.2 Getting GSM to Market – The 1994 French and German Perspective The strategy of the French and German Governments was announced to the GSM Group in late 1984 Their representatives at the GSM Plenary in October/November 1984 in London explained that they had given up the project of a Franco-German S900 analogue system and intended... like Switzerland and the Netherlands 3 I remember that, to make sure I had correctly understood, I asked the question: ‘‘Do you have in mind a fully digital system which could for instance work in TDMA?’’ Thomas confirmed that this was the case and TDMA was indeed adopted 6 years later by the GSM group Chapter 2: The Agreement on the Concepts and Parameters of the GSM Standard 25 BT and the DGT arranged... Concepts and the Basic Parameters of the GSM Standard (mid-1982 to mid-1987) Section 4: The GSM Memorandum of Understanding – the Engine that Pushed GSM to the Market Stephen Temple 1 2.4.1 Introduction In the 1980s there was a significant transformation of the European telecommunications market The decade began with strongly national focussed structures in place The PTT (Posts, Telephone and Telegraph... of the GSM Group (16th–20th February 1987) where France and Germany supported the broadband TDMA approach against the majority of the GSM delegations from 13 other European countries who favoured the narrowband one The earthworks for resolving the dispute had to be done in France and Germany Armin Silberhorn, who had then taken over from Klaus Spindler as head of the German GSM delegation, and myself . which allowed users in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (later expanded to the Netherlands and Switzerland) to use their terminals in the countries. be more and more difficult as time went by. Chapter 2: The Agreement on the Concepts and Parameters of the GSM Standard 21 7 GSM Doc 21/87 and GSM 22/87. This