Part FiveRevolutionising European Standards Making

PART 5 – REVOLUTIONISING EUROPEAN STANDARDS MAKING

Telecoms thrives on “Standards (The Ten Rules — Rule 5)

Context

Technical standards have been at the heart of all the earlier accounts. It is appropriate to include an inside account of the modernising European telecommunications standards making and in particular my role in the creation of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.

Chapter 29

DESIGNING THE PERFECT STANDARDS BODY

Before 1987, telecommunications standards making existed at three levels. The strongest level was the state-owned telecommunications monopoly which imposed standards on its home supply industries through supply contracts. European cooperation was through CEPT. There was a CEPT ‘harmonisation’ committee that had created a number of working groups. GSM was one of these. Only telecommunications administrations could attend. Then at the world level was the International Telecommunications Union. It had two activities: one for wireline telecoms and one for wireless. Both the European and global levels were relatively weak. The resulting national standard’ mismatches for wireline networks were ironed out at international gateways, and the standards mismatches for radio networks left mobile service fragmented and confined to national markets.

In 1984, the European Union committed itself to creating the Single Market. That was just at the point I joined the DTI, and it made Europe the prime focus of my time and attention. In 1987, the European Commission published a Green Paper setting out the areas of action in the telecoms sector for completing the Single Market. One proposal was for Europe to establish a European Telecommunications Standards Institute. It was just a few lines.

I caught the first glimpse of something afoot as I was leaving a dinner in Bonn in May 1987. It followed a meeting where I tabled the idea of a GSM Memorandum of Understanding to implement GSM by 1991. The German Ministry had laid on a minibus to take us back to our hotels. As I got in, a senior French official handed me a scrap of paper with a few scribbled headings on it. ‘It was a bit of brainstorming he and his boys had done on ideas for ETSI’ he said and added with a knowing look, ‘it was important for governments to move quickly to forestall the Commission’s taking the lead’.

The idea quickly gathered momentum. In the September meeting of the CEPT Telecommunications Commission, the step was taken to set up a preparatory group to draw-up proposals for ETSI. It was to be chaired by M Touton from France Telecom. I used the opportunity of all these important officials being in the one place to get my GSM Memorandum of Understanding signed. Both GSM and ETSI signalled a time of great change. Europe was on the move in telecommunications.

Having a blank sheet of paper, a group of friendly European colleagues and a chance to design the perfect standards body was a fun job. It was one of those rare occasions for having ideas with a real chance of changing the world for the better. It was, for the most part, a harmonious group sharing a common objective of modernising standards making for the telecoms sector in Europe.

There was almost immediate consensus on two points:

1. The new standards body would be open to industry to participate, which was not the case for CEPT, that was limited to network operators/administrations. It was also not the case with the established, recognised standards bodies, CEN and CENELEC, where industries attended via national standards bodies.

2. Standards making had to be accelerated by employing experts on a full-time basis to work on the most important standards.

There was a brief difference of view on whether membership of the new body would be by invitation or open to all. Those favouring a more closed approach were thinking of the new ETSI more like a collaborative research organisation. The UK view, shared by others, was that we should model ETSI on the US T1 committee that worked on the simple principle that if you had an interest and paid the subscription, you had a right to a seat at the table. The majority supported this approach but wanted to limit membership to ‘CEPT Europe’, which was the EU plus EFTA countries.

The Germans came in with a strong view that ETSI had to have a weighted voting system. CEPT had worked entirely by consensus. The dispute on the GSM choice of technology had to be resolved by ministers. The German Minister felt that was no way to make standards. What did he know about technology? Everyone fell into line. It was a big step for Europe.

Other ideas came from individuals and were taken on their merits. For example, over a coffee break, a German official, Peter Quander, wandered over to me and said he personally would like to see ETSI designated as an officially recognised European standards body, like CEN and CENELEC. I had no idea what this meant, but in the spirit of the group… if Peter thought it was a good idea, he had my support to run with it.

That was to ruffle more than a few feathers later in CEN and CENELEC.

The sharpest divergence was on whether the proposed highest-level bodies (the General Assembly and Technical Assembly) would comprise national delegations or individual members. France Telecom wanted ‘countries’ completely out of the picture and ETSI to comprise solely industry members. I saw real dangers in this. The network operators were dictatorial in imposing their own standards on their national supply industries. This was the source of barriers to trade. I wanted governments, operators and industry to be in the same room with the same common objective of a Single Market. I also wanted to create an alignment of voting methods for the adoption of formal standards created by ETSI and technical regulations created inside the EU. There might be trouble if something got a positive vote in, say, the Council and a negative vote in ETSI. Using the same voting method gave ETSI more legitimacy for its standards to be used as a basis for EU technical regulations in the wide CEPT area.

It was a hard fight, I won the argument in the preparatory group, but I did not win over the French chairman, who stubbornly stuck with the French line. This issue had to go to the CEPT Telecoms Commission for resolution.

The second dispute was where to locate the headquarters of ETSI. About a dozen EU countries all pitched in with offers to host the new organisation. At one meeting, I suggested a small team should do a site visit of all the competing locations and report back. Everyone else thought this was a waste of time... the front-runners were obvious, I was told. I did not press the point. The front runners were Darmstadt (Germany), Brussels (Belgium and known to be preferred by the EU Commission) and Maastricht (Holland). Copenhagen would get solid Nordic backing.

The CEPT Telecoms Commission met in early 1988 to consider the preparatory group report. The CEPT Telecoms Commission was chaired on an annual rotating basis, and it was the turn of the UK. Mike Morris from British Telecom International was the chairman. He was confronting two contentious issues: the role of nations in ETSI and the location of the HQ of ETSI.

The French were confident of winning on the issue of the role of nations versus industry for the General Assembly. On the location issue, France Telecom had absolutely no ambition to host ETSI, but when a large number of countries bid to be the location for ETSI, France Telecom decided to also bid. Their bid was just a bargaining chip to trade for support for their main concern – to defeat my proposal for the role of nations. That is standard French diplomacy. No other country took the French location bid seriously, and most had never even heard of Sophia Antipolis. One person even thought it was a Greek fishing village.

The issue of nations versus industry in the General Assembly debate was short, sharp and decisive. I got massive backing for the ETSI General Assembly’s to comprise national delegations.

There was no debate on location. It went straight to a ballot. CEPT did not have a voting system, so the chairman, Mike Morris, invented one. It involved each country’s having to give their first and second preference. The delegations agreed it.

The ballot papers were given to each delegation. I was sitting just behind the Dutch delegation and could overhear the discussion between their delegates. Whilst I do not speak Dutch, it was obvious they were unsure where to place their second preference. The decision was to go for the least likely to win and not to any of their main rivals. The widely held view of the least likely to win was Sophia Antipolis. When the results of the first ballot were given, it was obvious that everyone else was making the same tactical deduction, and the accumulation of second preference votes shot Sophia Antipolis to the top of the ballot. With a few more rounds of voting, all the favourites had been knocked out. Nobody had imagined this outcome was possible.

The final run-off was between Sophia Antipolis and Copenhagen. Very few delegations had instructions on which to back. A surreal coffee break followed. It was like everyone bunking-off school. Animated conversations were taking place over coffee, and it seemed to boil down to the sunshine in the South of France versus the high tax rates in Denmark. It was no contest – Sophia Antipolis won. The French were the most shocked of all.

After the meeting ended, I bumped into the Number Two official from France Telecom. He looked pale and shaken. He kept muttering ‘strange day, strange day’ in English as he stared into the mirror in front of him as he washed his hands. He confessed that offering Sophia Antipolis had only been a ploy to trade for something else. They had not even told their financial authorities of the offer to host ETSI since it seemed so unlikely they would win. Now he had to find a million-pound-plus budget from somewhere.

The story does not end there. A few months later, the ETSI preparatory group were all taken to Sophia Antipolis. The head of France Telecom showed the site of the proposed new building. It was an empty wilderness strewn with rocks at the edge of the Alps Maritime. Everyone looked at each other in disbelief. The rivals had been real buildings ready to move into. Peter Quander came up to me and said how much the Germans now regretted not taking up my suggestion in the preparatory meeting for site visits. Too late for that.

The EU Commission were angry at the choice of location. They wanted the location to be Brussels. Nobody in CEPT shed a tear on that score. The French, to their credit, stepped up magnificently and went on to build an excellent headquarters for ETSI at Sophia Antipolis. That took several years. In the meantime, France Telecom rented the Acropolis Convention Centre in Nice to host the General and Technical Assemblies. For the next four years, every few months I would walk from my hotel on the front to the Acropolis through the narrow streets of old Nice, with a temperature that was at least 10 degrees higher than London, thinking to myself… and the government is paying me a salary to do this? It was certainly an agreeable choice, if not quite what everyone had in mind at the outset.

ETSI was constituted by the UK DTI (as CEPT managing administration) and France Telecom (as host) and then opened-up for anyone to join under the rules the CEPT Telecoms Commission had adopted. In alphabetical order I guess that made the DTI ETSI’s very first member.

The first job the new ETSI had to do was to appoint its top officials who would run it. There were three top positions created: the full-time Director, Chairman of the General Assembly and Chairman of the Technical Assembly. Everyone’s eyes were on the plum job of Director. Professor Gagliardi had headed the technical harmonisation position in CEPT that was now being made redundant. He was also nearing retirement. He wanted the job. Others felt he would be too wedded to the old ways of working. The political compromise deal was that he would be the first Director but only for one two-year term, and the position would then be filled by open competition. Ib Loenberg from the Danish administration, who had chaired the CEPT Telecoms Commission meeting that launched the ETSI initiative, was the natural choice for the first Chairman of the General Assembly. He was well respected, efficient and with a very Danish dry sense of humour.

There was a presumption that somebody from industry would be found to chair the Technical Assembly for ‘political balance’. I wasn’t so sure.

There was a separation of powers between the General Assembly and Technical Assembly. The standards making machinery was entirely under the Technical Assembly. The pivotal figure was the Director, but Prof Gagliardi had been chosen to provide continuity. ETSI needed to be a revolution. I realised that the Chairman of the Technical Assembly would have to drive the revolution and handle the powerful forces this would unleash:

• The CEPT technical working groups comprised largely experts from monopoly network operators. In their domestic markets they had a customer-supplier relationship with their industries. In ETSI all members were to be treated as equals.

• The CEPT technical groups lived in a deterministic closed world of procurement contracts to favoured suppliers, whereas ETSI would soon have to face-off into a far more uncertain open market. (only the UK had opened its telecoms market at the time and I knew what was coming).

• There would be huge political pressure from the Commission for ETSI to deliver on their agenda for the Single Market by 1992.

• All this was on top of the usual industrial politics of technology advantage.

It was a big job. There were many senior people in industry with the calibre to handle this but would any of them be allowed the time off to take on this critical role? Since nobody from industry had been involved in the preparatory group, we had no idea of possible candidates. I discussed this with my boss, Robert Priddle. It was important to the UK for ETSI to succeed. Finding somebody to be Technical Assembly chairman whose sole qualification was that they were ‘from industry’ seemed a haphazard way to fill the post. We agreed he would put my name forward with a caveat that it would be withdrawn if industry came up with somebody matching my qualifications. It was a genuine offer to industry. Nobody stepped forward.

ETSI was now a legal reality. It had a vision. It now had a top team appointed. A paper design now had to be turned into a credible functioning reality.