Standards makers have been deadlocked for nearly six months now over technology options for a high-speed SIM card, and many expected the merger of smart card vendors Gemplus International and Axalto would break the impasse.
After all, the two vendors were responsible for the stalemate to begin with. For the past two years, each had championed a different option for giving the SIM a fast interface that would increase the speed at which SIMs and mobile phones could exchange data by 100 times or more. About the only thing both vendors agreed on was that a high-speed interface and protocol was vital to the future of the SIM card–allowing the SIM to run multimedia applications and store big content.
With Gemplus and Axalto wrapping up the major steps in their merger last week–and with another vote on the proposed SIM standard scheduled for early July–industry observers wondered which side the industry’s new mega-vendor, Gemalto, would come down on in the high-speed SIM technology debate. Would it back USB technology, similar to the interface used on PCs and one for which Axalto owned potentially valuable patents. Or would it support the Gemplus-sponsored MMC interface, like the one used on most flash memory cards in mobile phones. This technology also is the only one in use on actual high-speed SIM cards, as part of a pilot by French operator Orange.
Gemalto, however, has refused to choose one technology over the other and decided it would push both options. In a position paper Gemplus and Axalto recently filed with ETSI, the vendors declared a “high-speed protocol crisis.” They, along with other SIM vendors that had signed on, deemed it impossible for either MMC and or USB to garner a sufficient majority of ballots cast by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute’s Smart Card Platform group to become a standard. Any standard going to a vote on this committee requires more than 70% of the ballots cast.
“The two are on the table to be considered for different uses,” said Olivier Piou, former head of Axalto and now CEO of Gemalto, last week following the merger. “We will leave it to the operators to vote.”
But that so-called solution isn’t sitting well with some operators and handset makers or with a separate standards committee that must approve any high-speed SIM standard adopted by the ETSI smart card group.
“That’s not the idea of standardization, and I would expect to see significant objection,” Stefan Kaliner, head of UICC (3G SIM) development for Germany-based T-Mobile International, tells Card Technology. This would officially admit a market fragmentation since handsets would not support both at the same time.”
This would lead to even more fragmentation of handsets and SIMs on the market than would result if standards makers agreed on only one technology for the high-speed SIM, contends the Third Generation Partnership Project. The global standards body concerns itself with 3G mobile networks based on GSM technology and includes ETSI. 3GPP’s core networks and terminals committee, following its recent meeting in Warsaw, Poland, issued instructions to its subcommittee that deals with new SIM application standards: The subcommittee should choose only one interface for the high-speed SIM if the ETSI Smart Card Platform group decides to standardize two technology options next month.
“Every extra option in standards costs money,” says Shahab Lavasani, with the research and development department of Nordic mobile operator TeliaSonera and a member of the 3GPP committee. “We strongly prefer to have only one solution.”
ETSI’s smart card platform group deals with the SIM’s hardware, while the 3GPP subcommittee normally adopts standards for SIM applications. The two groups share many of the same members and have a cordial relationship–one body can usually be depended upon to approve the decisions of the other with little debate. So if the two standards groups were to split over the high-speed SIM, it could lead to even more problems for operators.
But the fracture between the two groups might become larger still if ETSI’s Smart Card Platform group fails to approve any standard at its next scheduled plenary meeting, in early July in Toulouse, France. 3GPP may then try to snatch the high-speed SIM issue away from the SCP group and adopt the standard itself. Representatives of large operator groups, UK-based Vodafone, T-Mobile and the 3 Group of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, proposed to do this at the last meeting of 3GPP’s core networks and terminals committee. The committee decided to give the SCP group one more chance, says Lavasani.
“If we don’t have a standardized solution, maybe we end up with a situation in which some operators run forward with multiple or proprietary solutions,” he says. “That’s why the big operators are now acting in 3GPP instead. Enough time has been spent on this without much progress, and now we believe that we cannot afford to lose more time.”
If 3GPP took the lead on the standards adoption away from the SCP group, SIM-centric operators could lose out, says Paolo Paganucci, head of SIM cards at Telecom Italia Mobile. He says the voting rules in the 3GPP give much less weight to operators as compared with the SCP group.
“If we give it to 3GPP, we risk losing the HSP (high-speed protocol) forever because of their voting rules,” he says.
Although it’s unlikely 3GPP would take the action, anything’s possible since the SCP group– made up mainly of operators, SIM vendors and handset manufacturers–appears as divided as ever over the high-speed SIM.
In answering critics to their proposal to standardize both the MMC and USB interfaces and protocols, card vendors say the market is already fragmented, with some operators supporting MMC and others USB. The vendors say that by standardizing both, operators could get to market faster with their high-speed, high capacity, SIMs. And while MMC-based SIMs and handsets wouldn’t be interoperable with their USB counterparts at first, volumes of these cards and terminals would be limited. During a “second phase” of development, the high-speed SIMs could support both interfaces and protocols. The vendors, however, don’t say when this second phase would begin.
Meanwhile, Nokia, the largest maker of handsets worldwide, along with telecom equipment maker Ericsson and handset maker NEC, issued its own paper, pointing out what it contends are technical flaws in both the proposed MMC and USB interface standards as originally proposed by Gemplus and Axalto, respectively. It also points out that intellectual property rights issues on the technologies haven’t yet been resolved. Chief among them is a claim by large flash memory card supplier SanDisk to key patents on MMC technology that it says it will refuse to license. Others contend the SanDisk patents are unimportant to the high-speed SIM debate.
In the end, the SCP group may have to standardize both technologies just to get a standard on the books, says T-Mobile’s Kaliner.