Structure and activities description
Founded in 1987, The GSM Association (GSMA) is a global trade association representing more than 750 GSM mobile phone operators across 218 territories and countries of the world. In addition, more than 180 manufacturers and suppliers support the Association's initiatives as associate members.
The primary goals of the GSMA are to ensure mobile phones and wireless services work globally and are easily accessible, enhancing their value to individual customers and national economies, while creating new business opportunities for operators and their suppliers. The Association's members serve more than 2 billion customers - over 82% of the world's mobile phone users.
The GSMA plays a pivotal role in the development of the GSM platform and the global wireless industry. Much of the GSMA's work is focused on two areas: Emerging services and emerging markets. The GSMA helps its members develop and launch new services, ranging from mobile instant messaging to video sharing to mobile Internet access, which will work across networks and across national boundaries. At the same time, the GSMA is heavily engaged in the industry's push to extend basic voice and text services to more people in emerging markets.
GSM is an evolving wireless communications standard that already offers an extensive and feature-rich 'family' of voice and data services. The GSM family of technologies consists of today's GSM, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) and third generation GSM services (3GSM) based on W-CDMA and HSDPA access technologies. Together these technologies underpin the GSM platform.
The GSM Association's Board comprises top-level representatives of some of the world's leading mobile operators, such as AT&T, China Mobile, Orange, Telefonica Moviles, T-Mobile and Vodafone.
Organizational Structure of GSMA is shown on fig. 1.
Fig.1 GSMA Structure
Structure of Working and Task Groups is shown on Fig.2.
Fig. 2. Working and Task groups of GSMA
Working and Task groups of GSMA include:
- Billing, Accounting and Roaming Group – BARG
- Transferred Account Data Interchange Group – TADIG
- Inter-working Roaming Expert Group -IREG
- Fraud Forum - FF
- Security Group - SG
- Services Review Group) - SRG
- Environment Working Group- EWG
- Devices Working Group – DG