Open Mobile Alliance


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

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 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 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: OMA is incorporated in California, USA.

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, the Wireless Village, The SyncML Initiative, 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 and mobile operators, and also software vendors.

Relation to other standards bodies

The OMA liaises with other standards bodies on a regular basis to avoid overlap in specifications:
The OMA maintains a number of specifications, including