Jogja Ponsel

Some of the world’s biggest cellular operators have gotten together to promote their vision of what next-generation mobile technology should look like.

Sprint Nextel, Vodafone Group, China Mobile Communications, Orange, NTT DoCoMo, Royal KPN, and T-Mobile International announced this week they have formed the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) initiative. NGMN, a nonprofit group based in London, won’t push a particular type of network but rather a set of guidelines that future technologies should follow, said Steve Falk, vice president of global standards at Sprint.

“We think that we can speak with a more organized and concerted voice that we have in the past,” Falk said. Vendors and standards organizations had stronger voices in the development of 2G and 3G systems. Carriers will represent the interests of their customers, the end users, he said.

The group, which is already consulting with equipment vendors but will only include carriers as members, may be pitting itself against Qualcomm, which developed much of the current 3G technology and has been criticized in some quarters for its royalty and licensing practices.

The NGMN is looking toward the technologies to follow 3G systems such as HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) and EvDO (Evolution-Data Optimized).

Carriers are still deploying and upgrading those networks, which are based on GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and
CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access) respectively, but even faster technologies are coming down the road. Sprint, for one, has called WiMax its 4G technology and plans to roll it out across the U.S. within the next few years. In choosing WiMax, the carrier used some of the guidelines NGMN was formulating, Falk said.

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