Telecommunications Pioneer Seizo Onoe Honored

Without Seizo Onoe, cellular phone networks would not be the source of global connectivity we know today. The IEEE life member was instrumental in driving the standardization for 3G and 4G mobile networks.

The first-generation networks that launched in the late 1970s and early 1980s were largely country-specific, designed for making only domestic or regional calls. There was no way to send text messages or other data over 1G networks. And interference from other radio signals made 1G coverage unreliable; there were plenty of dropped calls. Plus, without encryption, eavesdropping was a persistent problem.

In 1991 2G networks signaled the fledgling industry’s switch to digital—which improved security and broadened the range of features. Basic text messages became possible.

Individual countries and carriers had built their own telecommunications infrastructures, however, using different technologies and protocols (although Europe had established a common regional standard). An industry-wide, standardized cellular telecommunications infrastructure was needed.

Onoe answered that call, helping to align companies’ and countries’ infrastructures as 3G networks took shape.

For his efforts, Onoe has been awarded the IEEE Jagadish Chandra Bose Medal in Wireless Communications. The medal, bestowed for the first time this year, is named for an Indian scientist who pioneered radio and millimeter-wave research.

Onoe is currently director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau at the International Telecommunication Union.

The medal is designed to commemorate contributions to wireless communications technologies with a global impact.

“It is the highest honor for me,” Onoe says, “especially as I am the first recipient.”

Learning early digital mobile radio transmission

Onoe grew up in Akashi, in southwestern Japan. He says he was drawn to the “directness” of STEM subjects. He majored in engineering when he enrolled at Kyoto University in 1976.

“Of course, my parents also suggested engineering because it was more advantageous for employment,” he says.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1980 and an engineering master’s degree two years later. As a graduate student, he worked on early digital mobile radio transmission.

The primitive equipment on which he cut his teeth—repurposed (1.544 megabits per second) fixed-line hardware donated by industry—sent out mobile radio signals at data rates that would be comparable to those of 3G someday, foreshadowing the digital mobile future.

The debate behind the 3G standard

Japan’s Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in 1979 launched the world’s first 1G network. In 1982 Onoe joined NTT’s Yokosuka Electrical Communication Laboratory, in Yokosuka City. Starting his NTT career as a researcher, he helped develop the control signals necessary for call setup and other controls over an analog network.

“At the time, NTT’s mobile services was a very small division,” he recalls. Things really started changing in the early 1990s, he says.

In 1992 the company spun off its mobile division, Docomo (do communications over the mobile network). The name was popularly interpreted as a play on the Japanese word dokomo, which means everywhere.

Onoe was transferred to Docomo in 1992, when the company was founded, and was later promoted to executive engineer and director. NTT reacquired Docomo in 2020.

He contributed to 3G development, including work on a rapid cell search algorithm, which proved critical for network performance. The algorithm lets mobile devices quickly identify the nearest base station in a cellular network. And it didn’t rely on other systems, like GPS, to locate the correct cell in a network—making the process easier, faster, and less expensive.

His most challenging effort throughout the 1990s, he says, was including emerging digital cellular stakeholders worldwide—including governments, telecom companies, and regulators—to begin envisioning the infrastructure on which a truly global cellular network could be built.

That meant developing a single standard.

“There were many, many heated debates all around the world,” Onoe says.

According to history articles published online by Ericsson, the debates were complex and contentious. They involved entities from inside and outside the industry, including phone manufacturers, mobile service providers, standards boards, and government officials.

Europe alone was considering five different telecom infrastructures across the continent’s numerous cellular networks, Onoe says, highlighting the divide around the world. Some companies and countries supported time-division multiple access (TDMA), which would split the available network bandwidth into time slots and assign users specific slots for transmission. Others were pushing a different access technology that is partly competitive with TDMA and partly complementary to it: code-division multiple access (CDMA), which uses unique codes to allow multiple users to share both bandwidth and time.

As if that emerging standards landscape weren’t complicated enough, Sony championed yet another technology based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA).

In December 1997 the European Telecommunications Standards Institute met in Madrid. At issue would be who controlled the standards for, at the time, the 3G future.

And that is when the fur really flew. The Nordic mobile manufacturers Ericsson and Nokia squared off in what were, according to Ericsson’s account at least, “increasingly warlike circumstances.” Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, who the above account said “regarded Ericsson as a British company,” took Ericsson’s side in the squabbles. Other ETSI disputes aired at that meeting found their way into lawsuits years later.

None of the standards under consideration garnered enough votes to pass. A second vote would be held the following month in Paris—and so the lobbying began anew.

At the Paris meeting in January 1998, the ETSI voted on W-CDMA as the dominant standard for the world’s 3G networks. But in the spirit of compromise, the standards body also allocated a limited amount of 3G spectrum to TD-CDMA, a combination of the time-division and code-division methods.

Following that, in the final stage of the 3G standardization battle—a debate between wideband CDMA and a similar access technology, CDMA2000—Onoe emerged as a major player to help broker an agreement, as Japan at least hedgingly supported the push for W-CDMA.

“I decided to step in and join the war, so to speak,” Onoe says. “Across all these countries and vendors and individuals fighting, it was clear we were going to have to come up with some compromises to finally agree.”

Onoe helped lead an operators’ harmonization group to do just that. It proposed changing the chip rate—the frequency at which the smallest units of 3G code are transmitted.

With 3G politics addressed, the hard 3G engineering work then began in earnest.

“We had to start the development of the commercial system,” Onoe says. “I don’t think I fully appreciated just how challenging that was going to be.”

From 1999 until 2001, he says, he worked every day including weekends.

“I would start meetings at midnight, summarize the day’s activities, and plan for the next day,” he says. “It’s hard to imagine all these years later, but as a young and excited engineer, it was easy for me to do.”

NTT became the first company to launch 3G commercially, in October 2001. The new wireless standard vastly outstripped 2G’s data rates. Ultimately, average 2G download speeds were about 40 kilobits per second, while 3G eventually would boast up to 8 megabits per second. The 2G to 3G switch represented a night-and-day difference in speed, making 3G the first global standard to enable the first wave of mobile video calls, Internet browsing, online games, and streaming video content.

4G and telecom’s rapid bandwidth growth

With his contributions to 3G secured, Onoe continued to look forward. In 2009 Ericsson and Sweden’s TeliaSonera launched the world’s first 4G/LTE network. Five times faster than 3G, it unlocked high-definition video streaming, lag-free online gaming, and a new range of mobile apps including FaceTime, Snapchat, and Uber.

Onoe also played a key role in the global 4G standardization process. At the time, he was Docomo’s managing director of R&D strategy. He went on to become the company’s chief technology officer, as well as an executive vice president who served on the board of directors. When he left the company in 2022, he was NTT’s chief standardization strategy officer.

That year he was elected to his current role: director of the ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. He began his four-year term at the beginning of 2023.

“The ITU’s fundamental mission is to connect the unconnected,” he says. “One-third of the world’s population is still not connected. And common specifications help, because when they’re adopted widely, they create economies of scale. Competition increases, and the price drops. It’s a positive cycle.”

Collaborating with IEEE

Onoe joined IEEE early in his career—following company policy at NTT encouraging membership. He says he continues to renew his membership because he values the networking opportunities it provides, as well as chances to talk about the industry with fellow engineers.

He works closely with IEEE leaders in his current position at ITU. In December the organizations convened the IEEE-ITU Symposium on Achieving Climate Resilience, which aims to shape a technology-driven road map to confront the climate crisis.

“We also hold joint workshops and meetings and share thoughts informally,” Onoe says. “As I’ve seen throughout my career, it’s critically important that standards bodies actively collaborate if we hope to advance global technology.”