Do-it-Yourself Standards

By: Jesse Cryderman

Unfortunately for the engineers tasked with refining the rules that govern telecommunications, standards aren’t as sexy as the smartphones they empower. And yet telecommunications standards are the silent enablers that make our modern connected world possible. Like the behind-the-scenes management, production and songwriting pros that made Justin Bieber a megastar, standards occupy the shadowed sidelines near the stars while creating the very product on which the spotlight shines.

Numerous standards-developing organizations (SDOs) codify concepts from the laboratory into language and guidelines that ensure our devices function properly wherever and whenever they are needed. SDOs are like the swag coaches of the telecom industry. They keep our smart phones smart and a our iPhones cool. Standards like those developed by the ITU, TIA, IEEE, ETSI, GSMA, and 3GPP, such as IPv6, LTE and RCS, provide a star map of our connected universe.

Other B-List, quasi-SDOs appear on the site-seeing tour of the standards landscape such as the TM Forum, which essentially markets best practices for communications service providers (CSPs), and OpenStand, which creates a framework and guidance for building open ecosystems and interoperability standards. Both have their place, and address specific issues, within the standards community but are fighting for relevancy as the digital age continues to evolve.

With so many organizations involved and all of this activity in the realm of standards, one would imagine that everything important and critical to innovation is being covered in a timely, efficient manner. But this is not the case.  The reality is that standards routinely get bound up in long development cycles, competing interests and commercial blockades. One need only count the number of VoLTE deployments to understand that the development and adoption of standards moves slower than the market for new services.

As the telecommunications service landscape has become increasingly complex and volatile, the role of standards has evolved. Some industry analysts argue that fully open standards are needed to stitch together all of the disparate silos that have been created; these countless islands are the result of vendor tie-in and the rapid growth of networks; that is they’re systems that have emerged to fulfill demand as opposed to being designed for the task. Seemingly good news for organizations like OpenStand. But fully open standards, create an environment in which vendors can’t innovate or value price, ultimately driving them into commodity status. So what happens in the meantime?

Some CSPs and vendors have banded together and adopted a do-it-yourself (DIY) model to create solutions that enable innovation, interoperability and profitability. In the absence of fully ratified standards from A-List SDOs or fully effective Frameworx suite from the TM Forum, and against a competitive backdrop where time to market (TTM) is money — organizations are deciding to take matters into their own hands. For example the Operations Support Systems Interoperability Initiative (OSSii) and the Global M2M Association (GMA) are excellent illustrations of what CSPs and vendors can achieve when they buck the system and go DIY.