Action COST 231: a commitment to the transition from GSM to UMTS

Current mobile communications market analyses indicate that Europe is mobile aware and entering the consumer market. Although incompatibility is the essential weakness between today's cellular, paging, cordless and mobile data services, their strength lies in their responsiveness to customer demand in a variety of different public and private market sectors with an element of service-creation flexibility and standardisation of the individual system-access technology. The progressive migration from second to third generation systems, expected to start at the turn of the century, must hence be undertaken while ensuring that the current user markets will perceive such a service evolution as relatively seamless, attractive and natural. In this process, the main goal of COST 231 Action is to provide a suitable support to the efforts of both standardization and research bodies, taking into account the technological developments foreseen in mobile and fixed telecommunication networks.