The European Commission has published a blueprint for the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, a new generation of mobile phones supporting high speed data rates, in an attempt to emulate the success of the current GSM Groupe Speciale Mobile digital mobile phone standard. UMT, also referred to as the Mobile Telecommunications-2000 standard by worldwide standards body the International Telecommunications Union, effectively enables mobile multimedia systems which the Commission hopes will be capable of widespread European roaming, like GSM. In an effort to make the standard ubiquitous, the Commission is to propose to the World Radio Conference that extra frequencies should be allocated to UMTS services in 1999, and hopes to establish it as a global standard. Europeans Nokia Oy, LM Ericsson AB, Siemens AG, and Alcatel SA, have already jointly proposed that the network core of UMTS – the signaling and data transfer between base stations – should be based on current GSM technology (CI No 3,226). The air interface – the signal transmission technology between the mobile phone and the cellular base stations – has yet to be defined.
