News from the Mobile Domain's Special Interest Groups after the 9th Concertation Meeting SIG2 SIG2 focuses on Joint Trials involving also problem solving and coordination planning. General progress has been achieved in the areas of UMTS, WLAN, MegaTrial, Satellite area and Middleware Projects. The MPEG4 terminal had a reasonable performance while the GEO extra delay wasn't so noticeable compared to the coding delay. Joint Trial demonstrations are programmed to take place in 1999. A proposal has been made to close SIG4.
Any project dealing with the above topics is invited to provide input.
By 2002, broadband service will be available on a variety of media. The technologies are becoming available and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's BRAN project aims to develop specifications that would allow maximum functionality to be achieved at minimum cost. BRAN will make deployed networks interwork with different core networks, possibly simultaneously, because no single interworking technology will dominate the world in the near future. The common approach to core network independence is the introduction of a Core Network Convergence sublayer where the different core networks are removed and a common BRAN interface can be used. Broadband access is complementary to the large scale mobile networks, since it extends the performance and deployment mode scales at the cost of lesser mobility.