Vivek Badrinath, chairman, Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance

A senior France Telecom executive, Vivek  Badrinath also heads up the NGMN alliance, a grouping of cellular carriers whose mission it is to advise standards  bodies responsible for developing future mobile telephony platforms as to exactly what it is that operators want to see  delivered.

As well as his 19 operator members,  there are 34 vendor ‘sponsors’ and Badrinath’s responsibilities do touch on vendor-related issues. The NGMNA aims to run testing and accreditation programmes for handsets based on future mobile standards, for example. It also has ambitious objectives in the area of intellectual property, seeking to oversee the development of an IPR management framework that will hopefully avoid the wrangling that has beset previous mobile standards.

This is perhaps the greatest challenge that Badrinath faces, given the high ideals of the NGMN goals:  “A new IPR regime must be developed to support the licensing of NGMN technology in a manner, which leads to much greater transparency and predictability of the total cost of IPR for operators, infrastructure providers, and device manufacturers.

Candidate technologies… should be chosen on the basis of considerations such as performance, price and, quality. NGMN Ltd has a key objective to keep the total IPR burden of the technology at stake transparent, predictable and, within reasonable bounds, to the benefit of endusers,” the organisation has stated.

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