Study On Industry Relationship Of Telecom Operator In Mobile Standardization

With the increasing complexity of requirement of mobile communication, the global mobile communication standards have been more and more jointly driven by telecom operators and vendors. Therefore the demand side of mobile communication is not only the adopter of technology standards, but also the creator of them. Due to the large scale of mobile communication market in China, it is important to study the role and related industrial relationship of telecom operators in the creation of mobile communication standards.The present research has studied the influence of network externalities, technology evolution and regulation on the creation of standards. And with the results from these studies, enterprise standard strategies have been concluded to achieve the goal of marketdominance. Most of the present research regards enterprise as the vendors which conduct technology R&D and produce equipments to market. Therefore there is lack of research to explain the standard evolution with the involvement of telecom operators. The lack lies in three major aspects. The1st one is the lack of modeling of the goal of telecom operators in standard activities. The2nd one is the lack of study on operator’s industrial relationship in standard activities. The3rd one is the lack of theoretic analysis of operator’s strategies in standard activities.To make up such lack of research, this research studied the benefit of operator standard activities, analyzed operator’s industrial relationship during standard activities, and addressed some operatorstrategies to promote standard evolution. This research is based on the present research on technology standards, and the method is mainly based on economic gaming theory. This research achieved three major innovations.The first innovation is the model of expected operator utility in standard. This model builds up the relationship between operator’s standards behaviors and operator’s benefit from standards. It includes the internal utility which consists of the contributions from technology utility, production cost, operation cost and the industry structure. It also includes the external utility which comes from the market scale of all the operators selecting same standard.The second innovation studied operator’s industrial relationship in mobile communication standards. In the horizontal aspect, operators have four types of relationship as co-existence, parasitism, exclusion and attraction with other operators. In the vertical aspect, operators have five types of relationship as attraction, coordination, encouraging, balancing and partnership with telecom vendors.The third innovation proposed a set of operator’s strategies to promote mobile communication standard. The propose strategies consists of behavior, timing, and impact factors. This set of strategies can be referenced by operators in future standardization work.Besides of these three innovations, this research also introduces two kinds of new data to prove theoretic result. The first kind of data is from the evolution progress of TD-LTE standard. The second of data is from the contributions in3GPP organization during the past fifteen years. These two data has been not been used in academic research before, and they are quite good to study the evolution of mobile communication standards.