Rivalry in tech market to hurt communication

On Monday, 20 operators, including AT&T, Sprint Nextel, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, AmÚrica M¾vil, NTT Docomo of Japan and Bharti Airtel of India, created the Wholesale Applications Community, another group with the aim of developing common standards.

The four operators in JIL also joined, but both efforts will continue to run in parallel, at least for now.

Some question whether close rivals in the United States, like Sprint and AT&T, which pay developers to create applications unique to their networks and phones, will end up using a common standard, which could allow customers to more easily change carriers.