3.1. Benefits of Standardization for Wireless Tech.

What is a good standard? What is the wireless standard? Why standards need to be established and released? What are the benefits of standardization for wireless technologies? Which aspects should be concentrated on when setting institutions? Such many questions come out in everybody's mind to the people and organizations who may concern. That's because standard issues are significant for the progress and improvement of wireless technology. Scientific research and technologies update are faster and faster which should be combined with society application and people using. This section will discuss some relevant issues and explain the concerned questions.

Standards no only based on technologies, but also based on how the groups work on institutional establishment, economy, marketing, generalization, services, maintenance, and amendment, etc. Here more attention will be paid to others except technology.

Actually, related information about making a good standard is rarely given in literatures on standardization. This may be because the fact that this problem will change according to standardization ethics so that it depends on many other aspects. Different organizations for different purposes represent their special understanding of a good standard. However, normal properties should apply to a good standard as below [1]:

• The standard meets the needs of the users or the interested parties
• The standard is available to the users in time
• The standard is formulated in a way that is comprehensible and free of contradiction in terms of its scope
• The standard can be implemented by the users
• The standard does not contradict other existing standards. However, this point is open to discussion because occasionally competition supports differing standards. In this way, the better standard is intended to assert itself, and innovation is not obstructed.
• The standard should tend to be more performance-based than prescriptive
• The standard is sufficiently distributed amongst the users and is applied to an adequate extent by all interested parties. A standard that is not applied has no right to exist
• If the development of a standard starts at an early stage, the lower the problem ability will be that economic interests might have already formed among the participnts

Referring to many cases previously and currently, most of them suprisingly fulfill the requirements above. Especially for technical standards, such as wireless standards, they also are similar to the basic concept and situation of the properties of a good standard. Wireless standard based on the wireless technologies, and for the purpose of unifying the application and utilizing technologically, some specialized and professional organizations dedicate to the development of wireless standards such as IEEE 802 group, ETSI, WiMAX Forum and so on.

Economically, there are no doubts that standards have positive economic influences on economic performance. In the complicated word of standards, different types of standards exert their own affects on economic issues. In fact, the interdependence between standards and technical change which is widely agreed among economists as one of the most important economic fundamentals. It has been shown that standards can exert influences on technical change in a complicated situation. Generally speaking, standards are pro-effective for technical changes. Moreover, emphasis is placed on the interrelation between standards and competition which is believed to be the driving force of a market economy. That means the impacts of standards on competitive market structure are influenced by the dynamics and speed of technical change. Standards exert a positive influence on the transactions of goods and services across borders.

The benefits of a standard also can be discussed for some aspects such as equipment vendors, consumers, service providers, component makers especially for wireless standards. Firstly, for equipment vendors, standards-based, common platform fosters rapid innovation and addition of new components and services. They concentrate on specialization. Secondly, consumers receive services in areas that were previously out of the broadband loop, this happen in developing countries with little infrastructure while in developed countries to rural and hard-to-service areas. More players in the market translate into more choices for receiving broadband access services. For service providers, thirdly, common plantform drives down costs, fosters healthy competition and engourages innovations and wireless systems significantly reduce operator investment risk. Last but no least, for component makers, standardization creates a volume opportunities for chip set vendors/silicon suppliers.

Entire and reasonable organization structure is tremendously advantaged for standard development. For instance, IEEE 802 LAN/MAN standards committee develops Local Area Network standards and Metropolitan Area Network. IEEE 802.16 group focus on MAN and not only the standard based on IEEE technologically but also be certified by WiMAX Forum, assigned spectrum by WiSOA (WiMAX Spectrum Owners Alliance), and relate to other liaisons and external organizations such as WCA (Wireless Communications Association International), ITU (International Telecommunication Union), ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), CCSA (China Communications Standards Association), etc. On the other hand, WiMAX standard also combine with other companies including Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Cisco, Hutton and so on and service providers such as Clearwire, Sprint Nextel, etc. So that global network supporting for 802.16 (WiMAX) will fully improve the progress of this standard.

Overall, standardization have overwhelming positive performance for technology, service and network of the sophisticated technical application. That's why I am talking about WiMAX standard dimension as my topic in this blog.

References:
[1] Wilfried Hesser, Axel Czaya, Nicole Riemer, "Development of Standards" (Lecture Material of the course)
[2] http://www.wimaxforum.org/
[3] http://www.ieee802.org/16/