By Keith Willetts

There was a time, not that long ago, where fixed-line service providers built their own telephone handsets, but they don’t any more. The market pressure over a few decades took its toll and service providers eventually came to the realization that this was not a profitable enough pursuit for them. Soon a plethora of handset makers entered the market with much greater functionality, better looks and lower costs. Service providers concentrated on providing their services and handset manufactures made handsets.

An effective partnership was formed between the handset makers and service providers. Handsets encouraged new value-added functionality to boost service margins and handset makers sold handsets. Standardization of the sockets and the signaling ensured that each handset could work with any standard service provider.

So what’s different today? In short, service complexity. Look at the types of services now available that weren’t ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Where the POTS (Plain Old Telephony Service) took fifty years to bed down in the market, there are now new service types being created with alarming frequency every month and new ingenious ways to create revenue for not only communications services but information and entertainment, as well. These new services with high functionality are so new that operational engineers at service providers can’t use standard interface and processes, because there aren’t any. The short-term issue of just getting the services running is much more important to them than using standards. Standards tend to follow market

trends in most cases; however clearly making standards that no one is going to use makes no sense. In some cases standards have been the essential catalyst that has created and defined whole new markets. For example, where would the mobile industry be today without GSM standards for handsets or base stations, Bluetooth for accessories, and of