The Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI) has announced that it has achieved all its long-term goals to create an open market for cellular base stations. Established in September 2002, it set out to remove the barriers preventing module and component vendors from offering standard, cost-effective base-station products on the open market. Prior to the OBSAI initiative, module and component vendors could only provide custom-designed products to specific OEM customers, with the economies of scale inherent in generic products being unavailable to the marketplace. OBSAI has now achieved what many, at the time of its launch, thought was impossible, and released a comprehensive set of interface, hardware and test specifications for all of the main base-station modules and interfaces. These are now available for public download at the OBSAI website, www.obsai.org. These specifications enable the production of base station modules to fit any base station, substantially reducing the development efforts and costs that have been traditionally associated with new base station product ranges. The OBSAI base station interface specifications include GSM, GSM/EDGE, WCDMA, CDMA and WiMAX air interfaces.

The complete set of OBSAI interface specifications covers the subsystem areas of Transport, Clock/Control, Radio and Baseband - plus detailed System Reference Document and testing specifications. These, together with hardware connection specifications, are available for anyone to download from the OBSAI web site. Both members and non-members of OBSAI will be able to access the documents free of charge. OBSAI will continue to monitor the long-term evolution of the base station market to improve on its specifications and ensure they remain maintained and up to date. As new emerging standards come onto the market and are exploited, OBSAI will respond by ensuring specifications include these new standards.
www.obsai.org