Ericsson, Huawei, NEC, Nortel Networks and Siemens have jointly announced the creation of a new industry cooperation,

CPRI - Common Public Radio Interface, aiming to define a publicly available specification for the key internal interface of radio base stations.

The CPRI industry cooperation enables base station manufacturers to focus their research and development efforts on their core competencies and to buy selected radio base station subsystems.

Key benefits are faster development when introducing new technologies and allowing base station manufacturers to offer a wider portfolio of products to the operators with shorter time to market.

The operators will benefit from a broader choice of products and more flexible solutions, improving the efficiency of network deployment.

The founders of CPRI are committed to open up a competitive mobile network element component industry and will make the CPRI-interface openly available for the benefit of the wireless industry.

The CPRI-initiative complements current activities in existing standardization organizations (for example, 3GPP/3GPP2). The interface developed will be used for Radio base station products in mobile systems.

The CPRI-specification is planned to be available 2003, with the objective to introduce compatible products on the market by the end of 2004.