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PRINCIPLES


  • Mission. Its mission is to provide Interoperable service enablers working across countries, operators and mobile terminals.

  • Network-agnostic. The OMA restricts itself to the standardisation of ''applicative protocols''; OMA presumes the existence of a networking technology specified by outside parties. OMA specifications are agnostic of the particular cellular network technologies being used to provide networking and actual data transport. In particular, OMA specifications for a given function are the same with either GSM , UMTS or CDMA2000 networks.

  • Voluntary. The OMA is not a formal government-sponsored standards organization like the ITU , but rather a forum for industry stakeholders to agree on common Specifications for products and services. The goal is that by agreeing on common standards, stakeholders will be able to "share slices from a larger pie"; but strictly speaking, adherence to the standards is entirely voluntary as the OMA does not have a mandative role.

  • "FRAND" Intellectual Property Licensing. Members owning intellectual property rights (e.g. patents) on technologies that are essential to the realization of a specification agree in advance to provide licenses to their technology on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms to other members of the OMA.

  • Legal status. The OMA's legal status is that of a British limited company (cf. bylaws ).



HISTORY


The OMA was created in June 2002 as an answer to the proliferation of industry forums each dealing with a few application protocols: the WAP Forum (focused on browsing and device provisioning protocols), the Wireless Village (focused on instant messaging and presence), the SyncML Consortium (focused on data synchronization), the Location Interoperability Forum , the Mobile Games Interoperability Forum and the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum . Each of these forums had its bylaws, its decision-taking procedures, its release schedules, and in some instances there was some overlap in the specifications, causing duplication of work. The OMA was created to gather these initiatives under a single umbrella.

Members include traditional wireless industry players such as equipment and mobile systems manufacturers ( Ericsson , Siemens , Nokia , Openwave , Sony Ericsson , Philips , Motorola , Samsung , Texas Instruments ...) and mobile operators ( Telefónica , Vodafone , Orange , T-Mobile ...), but also software vendors ( Microsoft , Sun Microsystems , IBM , Oracle Corporation , Symbian , Celltick ...).


LINKS WITH OTHER STANDARDS BODIES


The OMA links (or, in standardization parlance, "liaises") with other standards bodies on a regular basis to avoid overlap in specifications:


EXAMPLE SPECIFICATIONS


The OMA maintains a number of specifications, including


EXTERNAL LINKS