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Telephone: +41 22 730 6039
Fax: +41 22 730 5939
E-mail: pressinfo@itu.int
by Bob Phillips, Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs
ICO Global Communications
(London, United Kingdom)
A decade ago, building a system seemed to be the biggest task facing the aspiring global mobile personal communications by satellite (GMPCS) providers. Now the technology has been tamed and the industry is getting to grips with an unprecedented regulatory challenge.
When the idea of delivering mobile satellite communications to hand-held terminals was first raised in the 1980s, it was believed that, of all the aspects of such a service, system development would present the greatest risks and demand the greatest effort. Much less attention was paid to service distribution and national and international regulatory approval. Now that three operators are well on their way to service launch, however, the true nature of the challenge is becoming clear.
If the experience of ICO Global Communications is any guide, system implementation is proving relatively straightforward. Development of London-based ICO’s space and ground segments recently passed a number of important design reviews and is proceeding on schedule towards service launch in the year 2000.
The complexities of developing ICO’s global distribution network to a very tight schedule grow ever more obvious. But significant progress has been made, with national and regional service distribution agreements covering nearly 100 territories signed to date.
The task of winning the necessary regulatory approvals seems similar in scale but could turn out to be the most demanding of them all. For example, the operators are only now beginning to win their first national operating licences. As none of them can afford to trickle into the market piecemeal, reaching global coverage over a period of years, there is great pressure on them to get the authorizations they need in each of the world’s national jurisdictions as early as the end of 1998, when Iridium is due to enter service. It is a huge job, and one to which ICO at least is devoting very significant resources.
The regulatory approvals governing the operation of a global mobile satellite system fall into several categories. Those affecting the free movement of mobile satellite terminals across national boundaries have had a significant impact on the growth of first-generation mobile-satellite services and could affect GMPCS similarly.
They include the type approval of user terminal designs and the licensing of individual terminals. If national jurisdictions continue to require local type approval and licensing — not to mention imposing high import duties — international travellers will be deterred from buying and using GMPCS terminals. There is thus a continuing risk that communications systems that are technically capable of offering true global availability will effectively be barred from doing so.
Fortunately, in the GSM Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) — created to promote roaming arrangements among terrestrial cellular operators in various countries — there exists a model solution that has been taken up by the GMPCS community. Providing for recognition of licences and terminal type approvals issued in other countries, the GSM-MoU is now mirrored by the GMPCS-MoU.
The GMPCS-MoU — adopted by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Members at the beginning of this year — was effectively a declaration of intent to develop a set of practical measures comparable with those of the GSM-MoU. These arrangements were drafted by around 20 GMPCS-MoU signatories and other interested parties and are now being circulated for comment. If favourably received, they will be made available this year for adoption by 160 administrations worldwide. Encouraging them to do so represents a massive lobbying task for the GMPCS operators and their national partners.
In parallel, a separate ITU initiative is helping developing countries to create domestic regulatory environments that will foster the development of GMPCS and bring the resulting benefits to their economies. It takes the form of five regional seminars designed to explain the technical characteristics of the systems and demonstrate the anticipated socio-economic benefits.
These measures are being supported by regional and global efforts to establish type-approval standards for GMPCS terminals. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has been active in this area for the past two years and an ITU group of experts is working to establish technical standards to ensure compatibility between GMPCS terminals and the stations of other radio systems.
The aim is to establish the principle of class or blanket licences for all examples of each approved terminal design. It is expected that these activities will come to fruition by the end of the year. Each manufacturer will then be required to show that its designs conform to the standards. Those that do will be marked accordingly to expedite their passage through national border checks and facilitate their subsequent use.
Of course, there would be little point in assuring the free movement of terminals across frontiers if there were no frequencies assigned for their use and for feeder (satellite-to-fixed Earth station) links. Frequency assignment and coordination for systems offering worldwide service call for an enormous amount of detailed country-by-country negotiation and administration, and have the potential to result in barriers to market entry by operators.
Though complex and time-consuming, international frequency coordination for GMPCS is, with a few exceptions, proving relatively uncontroversial. At the global level, each operator is working through its home regulatory agency to supply data on its network to the ITU, which then circulates the information to national regulatory authorities worldwide so that they can check for the possibility of interference with existing or planned networks.
At the national level, both feeder and service (user-to-satellite) frequencies must be coordinated through the national regulatory body. In the ICO scheme, the former approvals will be sought by the satellite access node (Earth station) operator, the latter by national service wholesalers as part of the normal licensing process. In some cases this may require transitional arrangements for any terrestrial radio systems currently using the frequencies.
The earth station operators and the companies that retail service to end-users will also have to obtain national authorization to operate. Factors affecting the issue of these licences will include local limitations on foreign ownership and compliance with national security requirements.
No public communications service can exist without a numbering scheme. Following recent ITU agreements GMPCS system operators have in effect secured their "country codes" — ICO’s are 8810 and 8811, for example — and it is now up to their national wholesalers to work with domestic fixed and mobile network operators to ensure that calls will be correctly routed and billed.
Finally, the system operators must obtain the necessary national approvals and licences for launch and operation of their space segments, and demonstrate that in operation they will conform with the agreed frequency coordinations.
This broad listing of the regulatory mechanisms that the operators must work with conceals the fact that many countries still lack a policy on which to base their approach to GMPCS. National administrations and regional organizations have recognized the problem, however, and with the support of the ITU are working to remedy it.
Examples of regional policy developments include this summer’s formal decisions by the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) on harmonization of authorization conditions and coordination of procedures. The decision covers access to frequencies for use by terminals, free circulation and licensing of terminals and service provision.
Similarly, the Regional African Satellite Communications Organization (RASCOM) has asked five of its member States — Cameroon, Tanzania, Senegal, Kenya and South Africa — to recommend regulatory principles for the introduction of GMPCS on the continent. The group met in Dakar earlier this year to hear each of the operators describe its system capabilities and likely distribution arrangements. RASCOM has since issued a report providing useful guidance on the regulation of GMPCS.
At least one strong signal is emerging from this process. Many regulatory authorities insist that service providers must be nationally based and subject to local regulatory control. The developing nations particularly are opposed to licensing any provider which has no operational or ownership base within the country.
Tanzania, for example, has invited "pre-qualification" proposals for the provision of GMPCS within its territory. The invitation indicates a readiness to issue licences subject to a number of conditions — including participation of existing national service providers, provision of service for remote and rural areas and safeguards against unauthorized use — and is likely to set a precedent for other countries in the region and elsewhere.
The sheer size of the task of preparing the regulatory ground for concerted worldwide service launch may have come as a surprise to some of the GMPCS contenders, and a number of issues — notably the number of national operating licences still to be obtained — continue to create both anxiety and a sense of urgency.
But the operators and their partners are now responding vigorously at global, regional and national level and beginning to piece together the jigsaw of approvals that they need. They are also cooperating as an industry to foster more supportive regulatory environments.
For their part, national administrations are recognizing the inevitability and the potential economic and social benefits of GMPCS systems and are beginning to build domestic and regional arrangements to facilitate their introduction and create the conditions for subsequent commercial success.
Along with the GMPCS operators and service providers, the administrations have been working to promote the total availability of affordable telecommunications in every country. It is hoped that the 1997 World Radiocommunication Conference will encourage that cooperation, and so help to achieve one of the fundamental goals of the ITU.
This text is an extract from ITU News 8/97