Carrier group to work on next-gen standards

Sprint Nextel is named among a group of GSM and WCDMA mobile operators that have joined forces to develop common standards and technologies for 4G. China Mobile, KPN, NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, France Telecom's Orange and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile have established the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) initiative. What's confusing is that the NGMN initiative was announced in June minus Sprint Nextel but at the time was focused on lobbying regulators to allow operators to use their existing spectrum to run super-fast wireless broadband services. One of the goals now is to create "a more transparent and predictable intellectual-property-rights regime," a spokesman at Sprint Nextel told The Wall Street Journal. Sounds like a shot at QUALCOMM. It's been known for some time that Sprint Nextel has been closely aligned with these European operators. We could see a push from the operator to align both CDMA 1xEV-DO and WCDMA/HSDPA standards when OFDM comes along.

To read more about the NGMN initiative:
- check out this article from The Wall Street Journal (sub. req.)
- take a look at this article from RCR Wireless News