When does a standard officially become a standard? Does a loose collection of vendors and a government getting behind a technology and issuing some guidelines equate to one? Well, the South Koreans seem to think so. The WiBro technology championed by the likes of Samsung and LG Electronics has moved in a terminological sense from proprietary technology to standard. (See Samsung tests WiBro technology.)

It's not for me to say what's a standard and what's not a standard. There are a lot of GSM proponents who would still blanche at the suggestion that CDMA, for all of its proprietary interfaces and SIM-less handsets, is a standard. But a standard, after all, really only matters to the people who support it. To the people working within that standard, it's a handy way of pushing technology forward. To everyone else, a new rival upstart standard is sometimes something that can be ignored, but sometimes that new standard can become something more--a pain in the established standard's side or even a threat. Just look at what happened with CDMA.

It's hard to say whether WiBro will be such an upstart standard. The WiMAX Forum probably could do without the bother right now as it tries to get its own membership to join ranks and hash out the commercialization of its own vision of 802.16e. As far as chips, the forum certainly holds the most with the longest list of industry vendors and carriers, including the WiBro consortium's membership itself. But WiBro proponents, much like CDMA's, are committed to being timely--to hash out specifications and get a working 802.16e system out on the market while the much bulkier forum debates. First to market means a lot in this industry, and if you couple it with superior technology, what was proprietary has a funny way of becoming standard.

E-mail me at kfitchard@primediabusiness.com.