Industry giants to create open mobile architecture

A number of industry leaders have announced a commitment to create a global and open mobile and services market.

The initiative, launched by AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless, MM02, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica Moviles, Vodafone, Fujitsu, Matsushita, Mitsubishi Electric, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Symbian, marks an important milestone as industry stakeholders come together to boost the early introduction of new, interoperable mobile Internet access and visual content downloading services worldwide, utilizing the GSM/GPRS evolution and the upcoming 3G mobile telecoms networks adopting WCDMA technology.

By following consistent global and open standards, these industry leaders will be able to provide consumers with a wide selection of different competitive, yet interoperable terminals and services, thus promoting significant industry growth, and ensuring that economies of scale are enjoyed throughout the industry.

The companies will conduct mobile software development in full compliance with the specifications of the key industry standardizations organizations such as the 3GPP and the WAP Forum.

The companies supporting the initiative will continue to actively participate in these standards bodies to expedite the acceptance and deployment of these specifications to fuel further industry growth.

The scope of this industry initiative encompasses terminal client software modules for mobile terminal vendors, and the corresponding server solutions for mobile operators.

Doing this will offer mobile operators, systems integrators, IT suppliers, terminal manufacturers and application developers new avenues of growth and revenue by enabling a multi-vendor ecosystem built on open industry standards such as WAP2.0/XHTML, MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), SyncML and other 3GPP compliant technologies.

Additional important component examples of the initiative include Java technology and the Symbian OS.

AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless, MM02, NTT, DoCoMo, Telefonica Moviles, Vodafone, Fujitsu, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Electric, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, Siemens, Sony, Ericsson, Toshiba and Symbian commit to products and services based on these enablers.