KOLKATA - The International Standards
Organization (ISO), the authority that develops
and regulates international standards globally,
may have rejected China's proposal to accept its
home-grown WLAN (wireless local area networks) as
an international standard, but it appears that its
prestigious WAPI (wired authentication and privacy
infrastructure) is gaining ground fast within the
country.
According to reports emanating
from last week's China Hi-Tech Fair held in
Shenzhen in southern China, two of the country's
largest non-government
wireless-network integrators - CERNET (China
Education and Research Network) and ITopHome - and
the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center have
agreed to use WAPI as their preferred standard and
have signed an alliance with the 22-company WAPI
Industrial Alliance to promote the technology
jointly.
"This represents the technology's
first breakthrough in the non-governmental
market," said Li Jinliang, a telecom expert with
China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII),
while officials of both CERNET and ITopHome said
they chose WAPI because it offered better security
than the globally ubiquitous WLAN standard 802.11,
or wi-fi (wireless fidelity) as it is more widely
known.
Li said WAPI is already being
widely used by the government sector, and this
agreement is significant because its acceptance by
private users, who unlike the government sector
are under no compulsion to use WAPI, means that
non-governmental forces too are keen to promote
the spread of the technology and have found uses
for it in new areas.
Indeed, the saga of
WAPI is a curious case of how a technical standard
can become a high-decibel diplomatic issue in the
Chinese government's efforts to shape new
technology standards for the nation's economic
advantage.
But what is a technology
standard and how does it matter? After all, what
difference does it make to a mobile caller in
China whether he or she uses wi-fi or WAPI to make
the call? Yet standards are important because they
are the unanimously acknowledged "specifications"
that deal with the nuts and bolts of how things
work.
International standards are achieved
through consensus agreements among international
delegations representing all the economic
stakeholders, such as suppliers, users, government
regulators and other interest groups, such as
consumers. All agree on specifications and
criteria to be applied consistently in the
classification of materials, in the manufacture
and supply of products, in testing and analysis,
in terminology and in the provision of services.
In this way, international standards provide a
reference framework, or a common technological
language, between suppliers and their customers -
which facilitates trade and the transfer of
technology.
According to the China
Electronic Standards Institute, it is important
that China also develops its own standards because
it is already a pre-eminent manufacturer of
standard-based products and also a huge user of
such products. Therefore, China needs to reduce
the license fees it pays to an international
developer of standards (say, Intel) to use those
products as well as to earn
intellectual-property-related revenues for making
such products (such as computers).
The war
between wi-fi and WAPI is a good example of how
its own standard is important for China. Wi-fi
refers to a family of specifications developed by
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers Inc, which claims to be the world's
leading professional association for the
advancement of technology. It was developed for
wireless local area networking (wireless LAN) and
specifies the over-the-air interface between two
wireless products - say, laptops.
WAPI is
simply China's own version of wi-fi developed by
IWNComm, a private company in Xian. China
initially mandated that all WLAN equipment sold in
China comply with the new technology as of
December 2003. The decision created huge friction
with the United States because it would in effect
have closed the huge Chinese market to all
US-developed wi-fi products. China later bowed to
legitimate concerns about hampering global trade
in WLAN equipment and, in March 2004, agreed to
postpone promulgation of the regulation
indefinitely.
But that agreement turned
out to be hardly indefinite. China started its
crusade again in July 2004 when it sought to
establish WAPI as a global standard through the
international standard-setting procedure. Alleging
that 802.11 standards "were notoriously weak in
security", China submitted a revised version of
WAPI that month to the ISO for recognition as a
global standard.
Meanwhile, the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) too
filed a revised and more secure version of 802.11
standards called 802.11i to the ISO for nomination
as the global wi-fi standard. However, in the
follow-on session at Frankfurt in February 2005,
the Chinese delegation walked out, alleging that
the IEEE was violating ISO rules to promote
802.11i against Chinese interests.
Consequently, last October the ISO decided
to select either both standards and none, or WAPI
only, or 802.11i only as a global standard/s
through a six-month-long fast-track ballot ending
in March. Unfortunately for China, though, on
March 7 the ISO members overwhelmingly accepted
802.11b and rejected WAPI.
But that hardly
proved to be a solution for the warring factions.
China's Broadband Wireless IP Standard Group
(BWIPS) continues attacking 802.11i, alleging that
the IEEE has again "unjustly" and "unfairly"
violated ISO rules to mislead the voters on the
new international standard. It also says 802.11i
is still an "immature standard with many serious
technical defects and numerous editorial errors".
Supporters of 802.11i say WAPI cannot be
considered as a global standard because the
Chinese government has not made its algorithms
public and therefore independent verification of
the strength of the security is not possible.
But the failure to make WAPI a global
standard seems to have hardly affected China's
plans to promote it in its home market. In March,
supported by the MII, the National Development and
Reform Commission and the Ministry of Science and
Technology, the government founded the WAPI
alliance to spur its industrialization.
According to Cao Jun, chief executive
officer of IWNComm and vice leader of BWIPS, 22
companies joined the alliance, including chipset,
software, and
information-technology/telecom-equipment vendors
such as CEC Huada and LHWT Microelectronics,
Lenovo, and Huawei.
In an interview to a
newsletter published by BDA China, a Beijing-based
technology-research firm, Cao Jun said, "IWNComm
has made significant steps toward licensing,
signing up four to five OEMs [original equipment
manufacturers] of laptops or home electronics,
small manufacturers and bigger players like
Hisense. We expect to negotiate more licensing
agreements with OEM vendors soon.
"I know
that there are more than 10 companies and dozens
of products which are currently applying for
government authentication," added Jun, revealing
that "over 50% of new WLAN products on the market
are expected to be WAPI-compliant by the end of
2006, driven by strong government support and
demand from operators".
Nevertheless,
according to Meiqin Fang, an analyst with BDA, the
wi-fi vendors won't give way to WAPI easily. "The
stakes are higher for wi-fi vendors because they
are still dominant in China," Fang said.
According to Analysys International,
another China-based research outfit, China with
its large population and burgeoning urban middle
class is emerging as a key market for a wide
variety of technology and consumer-electronics
products, and wi-fi is no exception. After an
initial period of hype in 2001-02, followed by a
period of disorder and transition, a maturing
market for wi-fi products and services is
beginning to take shape there and that is expected
to gain strength and grow in the coming years, it
said.
"By 2008, revenue for non-embedded
wi-fi equipment (access points, external PCI
cards, etc) is expected to reach 10 billion yuan,"
Analysys said. "With China's embrace of the PC
[personal computer], the mobile phone, and
consumer electronics, wi-fi brings a compelling
value proposition to the China market."
This is why Fang sees a standards war
looming ahead in China. "It remains to be seen
whether the two factions can compromise," she
said. "The problem with WAPI is that it is late
compared to wi-fi, which has a long history and
thus partnership with different vendors. But WAPI
is also important for the market because it will
provide competition to put pressure on the vendors
to drive prices down."
According Fang and
others, though, China needs more than one
standard. After all, said Fang, "Technology is not
the most important aspect of a market; more
significant [are] volume, scale, price, user
experience and convenience of users, and from
these aspects it is important to balance the
interest of different groups."
Indrajit Basu is a Kolkata-based
journalist.
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