Sam Omatseye

If the Internet and mobile networks tend sometimes to be a choir of discord, the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum wants to be the voice of symphony.

Founded in January 2000, the MWIF is dedicated to the merger of the two segments of the wireless industry by seeking a common core network.

"There are a number of forums out there, but no one looks bullseye into this fusion space," said Dean Sirovica, chairman and president of the forum.

In the frenzied search for a technology to end all technologies, MWIF is following the path of final solution by bringing together players from all the segments of the industry including operators, vendors and Internet service providers.

"Our goal is to help create a single core network that will support all access technologies, including wireless, fixed wireless and wired," he said. "We want the core network to be built using the best of the Internet and mobile networks."

Sirovica said the forum is a standard-influencing body rather than a standard-development body. It embraces the big picture of technologies and not the minute details, which is the province of standard-development bodies.

They refer any observations or recommendations on standards to the specific standard-development organization like the Internet Engineering Task Force.

The MWIF came into being when key industry players realized the necessity for a single network in the future. The single network, according to Sirovica, will operate without causing obstacles to access technologies, which will continue as the nuts and bolts of the main technology.

"We don't want to slow down the innovation of access technology," said Sirovica. "It will be evolving for many years to come."

The forum decided to work on the core network, leaving the access technologies as independent components of the core networks. This way, he said, innovations will flourish.

He said the current reality of discordant networks is expensive and cumbersome and changing an interface means changing the whole network behind it.

With a basic scalable network, all access technologies will conform, he said.

Sirovica noted that with the boom in both Internet and Mobile networks, especially in Europe, the two types of networks have to conjoin to avert what he described as bifurcation,' which could be expensive and lead to turmoil in the customer base.

He said the MWIF is aware of the future need to merge both commerce and personal information and that interest is best served by fusing both segments in one device and platform.

He said MWIF wants to limit the span of the access technology within the core technology so that they can replicate, move and update the components of the access technologies without changing the core networks.

"We want them to tweak it without changing the layers of architecture," said Sirovica.

He said the forum is trying to influence W-CDMA, cdma2000 and the Internet community to merge into one network.

The operator-led, nonprofit forum was founded by operators such as Vodafone, Orange, Sprint PCS, KDDI and UUNET and such vendors as Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks and Siemens. About 60 companies founded the forum and it has had more than 100 new members within a year. More information is available at mwif.org.

"The growth has been staggering and we knew that we are not the only ones who thought it was necessary," said Sirovica.
 

Copyright 2001 Crain Communications, Inc.
RCR Wireless News
January 29, 2001, Monday