Open Mobile Alliance

Open Mobile Alliance
Abbreviation OMA
Formation June 2002
Type Standards Development Organization
Headquarters San Diego
Region served
Worldwide
Membership
Wireless Vendors, Information Technology Companies, Mobile Operators, Application & Content Providers
General Manager
 Seth Newberry
Website www.OpenMobileAlliance.org

The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is a standards body which develops open standards for the mobile phone industry.

Principles

Mission
To provide interoperable service enablers working across countries, operators and mobile terminals.
Network-agnostic
The OMA only standardises applicative protocols; OMA specifications are meant to work with any cellular network technologies being used to provide networking and data transport. These networking technology are specified by outside parties. In particular, OMA specifications for a given function are the same with either GSM, UMTS or CDMA2000 networks.
Voluntary adherence
Adherence to the standards is entirely voluntary; the OMA does not have a mandative role. The OMA is not a formal government-sponsored standards organization like the ITU, but 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".
"FRAND" intellectual property licensing
OMA members that own 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.
Legal status
The OMA is a British limited company.[1]

History

The OMA was created in June 2002 as an answer to the proliferation of industry forums each dealing with a few application protocols: WAP Forum (focused on browsing and device provisioning protocols), the Wireless Village (focused on instant messaging and presence), The SyncML Initiative (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, Thomson, Huawei, ZTE, Reti Radiotelevisive Digitali, Nokia, Openwave, Sony, Philips, Motorola, Samsung, LG Electronics, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm) and mobile operators (Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, LG Telecom), and also software vendors (Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle Corporation, Symbian, Celltick, Expway, Mformation, InnoPath, Motive).

Relation to other standards bodies

The OMA liaises with other standards bodies on a regular basis to avoid overlap in specifications:

Standard specifications

The OMA maintains a number of specifications, including

See also

References

  1. ↑ (PDF) http://web.archive.org/web/20051210203119/http://www.openmobilealliance.org:80/docs/Articles_of_Association2004.pdf. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 10, 2005. Retrieved July 30, 2005. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  2. ↑ Slides Slides
  3. ↑ dret.net Glossary WAP1

External links

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