A group of 18 operators from five continents have banded together to form the Global UMTS TDD Alliance, which aims to promote this as the leading standard for delivering wide-area wireless broadband and other high-speed packet-based services.
UMTS TDD stands for Universal Mobile Telephone Service Time-Division-Duplexing and is a mobile broadband technology, which is a packet data implementation of the international UMTS standard.
Launched yesterday at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, the alliance has been founded by members of the UMTS TDD community, including both operators and vendors from around the world, and has been sanctioned by the GSM Alliance.
SA is represented in the alliance by Sentech, which recently launched it satellite broadband offering.
"The creation of this alliance will help to bridge the digital divide in SA and the African continent far more quickly than we had previously envisioned," says Winston Smith, Sentech's product manager for wireless broadband.
The goals of the alliance have been set out as being to create a greater awareness of UMTS TDD technology; to offer a forum for information sharing; to support collaborative technology development, interoperability testing, and certification; to educate the market about the economics of UMTS TDD deployments; and to provide a resource for information on TDD solutions.
Another of the primary drivers for the creation of the alliance is the demand from operators in all stages of deployment for both technical and marketing insights from those operators that have already launched commercial networks.
Countries represented in the alliance include Germany, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, the US, Mongolia, Ireland, SA, Portugal, Kazakhstan and New Zealand.
"Just as GSM was a revolution for voice services, so we believe that TDD is the revolution for broadband data service," says Christian Irmler, CTO of Germany's Airdata.
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