3GPP held its first meetings in December 1998 after agreements between the regional standards bodies (ETSI, AFUB, and others) were made to focus the development of UMTS and WCDMA technologies under a single global project. The 3GPP Release '99 physical layer interface is now becoming stable and work is proceeding on the subsequent annual releases of the specifications, known as Releases 4 and 5.
The need for industry concensus on certain design and implementation issues calls for the need for standardisation on agreed areas. For example, the UTRA air interface is standardised clearly in 3GPP; this allows multiple vendor equipments to be introduced into the market, thus driving competition. Thus standardisation is needed in cases where interfaces between vendor equipments exist. In such cases, resources expended constitute overhead and visibility of the standards process enables competitor intelligence gathering. However, more crucially, standardisation can be used to enforce technology leadership and thus competive advantage.
On the other hand, evolution can remain vendor specific; for instance, it may not be necessary to standardise a particular receiver algorithm which functions within a terminal or basestation; in these cases, equipment is not prevented from multi-vendor functioning where no standardisation exists, but the performance or cost to market may differ from one vendor to another.
The need for industry concensus on certain design and implementation issues calls for the need for standardisation on agreed areas. For example, the UTRA air interface is standardised clearly in 3GPP; this allows multiple vendor equipments to be introduced into the market, thus driving competition. Thus standardisation is needed in cases where interfaces between vendor equipments exist. In such cases, resources expended constitute overhead and visibility of the standards process enables competitor intelligence gathering. However, more crucially, standardisation can be used to enforce technology leadership and thus competive advantage.
On the other hand, evolution can remain vendor specific; for instance, it may not be necessary to standardise a particular receiver algorithm which functions within a terminal or basestation; in these cases, equipment is not prevented from multi-vendor functioning where no standardisation exists, but the performance or cost to market may differ from one vendor to another.
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