Who’s setting standards and why?

Standards are rapidly being transformed from good business sense on one hand and concern for public good on the other into political battles of one-upmanship that benefit no one.

First of all, let me state on the record that I’m all for standards where they make sense. I believe they can be quite effective in setting the rules for how business should be conducted, and they give companies that follow them at-a-glance parameters for how to design new products and how to run their businesses. They’re big time savers because re-inventing the wheel never did anyone any good.

But there are good standards and there are bad standards, and there are standards that are portrayed as being for the public good while they’re actually nothing but tools for political favouritism.

Case in point: The Restriction of Hazardous Substances rules. Getting out lead in concentrations of less than one per cent may sound great on paper. No one, after all, likes lead in the environment. It retards your ability to learn and stores up in your body. That’s why we don’t have lead pencils anymore, and it’s why no one in their right mind would drink out of an old pewter coffee mug.

But tin isn’t necessarily all that much better for the environment (neither is aluminum, for that matter), and when you have to raise the temperature for soldering components onto a board by 20 degrees or more, it may be defeating any environmental gains brought about by eliminating traces of lead in solder.

Unlike standards such as VHS and Betamax, the competing formats for videocassettes, these types of standards aren’t being left up to the market to decide. They’re being left up to governments, and that’s a potentially dangerous thing — especially when they favor indigenous industries or interest groups that don’t think through all the consequences. For example, it’s impossible to find current models of diesel cars for sale in California even though those cars now typically get better mileage than hybrids and cause less pollution.

Consider China’s new homegrown 3G standard, TD-SCMA (time division-synchronous code multiple access). The results of who wins the standards war in China’s 3G market may not be a function of open competition. It may be more a matter of unfair advantage for indigenous companies that have developed the standard.

Potentially even more troublesome are China’s pending restrictions on cell phone radiation — something under debate even within China. No one wants to have their brain fried by their cell phone, but a standard that would cut the specific absorption rate (SAR) in half could create an instant infrastructure nightmare.

One proposal now under consideration in China would cut radiation in half. While that sounds great on paper, it means that cell phone signals would degrade more quickly because the base stations would be running at half power. And because we live in a global supply chain, that almost certainly would mean major problems in places like North America where distances are enormous and cell phone reception is already limited. The only way around that is to build twice as many base stations, which collectively would still be emitting the same level of radiation.

While standards sound good on paper, they require far more thought about how they play out in a global marketplace than in a single geography. Business is no longer done in a vacuum, and we can no longer afford to have standards that are set in one.

www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews