Evaluating government-led standardization policy: A case of Broadband Convergence Network standard model

Abstract

Attempts by government-led large scale R&D projects are frequently identified and proactive national standardization policies named de jure standardization are implemented in newly industrialized countries such as South Korea and China. Though these policies usually focus on technology standards associated with mobile communication, the Broadband convergence Network (BcN) project was also planned to consider standardization by implementing a subproject, BcN standard model from the beginning. While the performance of BcN is largely evaluated using qualitative methodologies, studies on standardization policy by BcN standard model are not investigated. Therefore, this paper evaluates the BcN standard model in order to examine the effectiveness of a government-led standardization policy. For the case analysis, a survey is conducted to observe the adoption rate of the BcN standard model, and an interview is entailed to review the efforts on BcN standard model. According to the adoption rate of the BcN standard model, the lower layer which needs a significant amount of investments shows a low adoption rate, while the higher layer shows a high adoption rate due to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Different adoption rates of the layers are unintended results of de jure standardization, and rather a form of consortia-led standardization is revealed. In such large scale public sector projects in which multiple stakeholders are involved, standardization policies may not be effective.