ABSTRACT
The general trend of industrial standards of mobile communications is from nationalism to regionalism and globalism. During the first generation, which began around 1980 and ended in the mid-1990s, nationalism was the rule among advanced countries, with some signs of emerging regionalism. Regionalism might enhance the competitiveness of a regional standard by creating a large home market for the standard. This chapter presents an examination of the issue of mobile communications standards in East Asia and Europe. The establishment of a common mobile communications standard had been discussed as part of the overall cooperation among the Scandinavian countries. In East Asia, regional market fragmentation continued during the second generation. The dominant carriers of China, Korea and Japan will end up having different mobile phone technology standards even in the third generation. Since 2000, China has been fostering its information technology industry and needed to put technical barriers in place against Japanese and Korean goods and technology.
