What's Brewing with 3G?
This article first appeared on Cnet.
The original link can be found here.
Just when you thought you knew all there was to know about mobile connectivity and its own special jargons, someone comes along and pulls the rug right out from under your feet. What am I talking about? The new 3G (Third Generation) standards that's what. Sure you've got WAP right now, and life is good. But then again, is it? How many times have you tried to get some piece of information from a WAP-enabled site only to find that it takes forever to load up? The main complaint against WAP right now is the amount of bandwidth you get - about 9.6K/sec. That certainly isn't a lot when you compare it to even a narrow-band 56K modem. However what industry experts are touting as "the fix" sounds almost too good to be true like speeds of up to 2Mbps, ability to stream video. Imagine being able to catch the news on your phone while you're stuck in traffic.
The transition of mobile connectivity standards has come quite a long way in a relatively short time. First we had analog, then digital and now multimedia is on the horizon. During the first and second generation technology, different regions of the world pursued different mobile phone standards. Europe pursued NMT and TACS for analog and GSM for digital, North America pursued AMPS for analog and a mix of TDMA, CDMA and GSM for digital. Asia has had PCN and GSM for quite some time. What telecom companies are trying to do now is to converge everything into one common standard for mobile multimedia transmissions called Third Generation (3G) - a technology which is based on CDMA. The main problem isn't whether 3G will work - but more of a question of whether telecommunication companies are willing to ditch their existing 2G hardware and move to the 3G platform.
How does it work
With 3G, information is split into separate but related "packets" before being transmitted and reassembled at the receiving end. Packet switching is similar to a jigsaw puzzle - the image that the puzzle represents is divided into pieces at the manufacturing factory and put into a plastic bag. During transportation of the now boxed jigsaw from the factory to the end user, the pieces get jumbled up. When the recipient empties the bag with all the pieces, they are reassembled to form the original image. All the pieces are all related and fit together, but the way they are transported and assembled varies.
Packet switched data formats are much more common than their circuit switched counterparts. Common examples of packet-based data standards include TCP/IP, X.25, Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). Although packet switching is new to the GSM world, it is pretty well established elsewhere. In the mobile world, CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data), PDCP (Personal Digital Cellular Packet), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and wireless X.25 (the international public access packet radio data network standard) technologies have been in operation for several years.
Faster transmission of data
In this day and age, the World Wide Web is becoming the primary communications interface of choice - people access the Internet for entertainment and information, the Intranet for accessing their company information and the Extranet for accessing customers and suppliers. These are all derivatives of the World Wide Web aimed at connecting different communities of interest. There is a trend to move away from storing information locally in specific software packages on PCs to doing it remotely on the Internet. With the bandwidth that 3G brings to the table, it is theoretically possible for users to get access to almost any bit of information they would normally have access to via their desktops.
While speeds of up to 2 Megabits per second (Mbps) are achievable with Third Generation (3G), the data transmission rates will depend upon the environment the call is being made in - in short you're probably only going to get 2Mbps connection rates while indoors or in a stationary environment. While you're on the move, you're probably only going to get data rates of about 144kbps - this is still a whole lot faster than what we're getting now. It's even more bandwidth than what the majority of users here have at home!
Perhaps one of the most exciting features of 3G is that it will facilitate several new applications that have not been available across mobile networks due to the limitations of the data transmission speed. Stuff like direct file transfer and the ability to monitor wired-household appliances directly from your phone.
When can I get 3G access?
Well that depends a lot on where you live. Let's just take Malaysia for example. Although there has been word that a few telecom companies have said they've begun testing 3G no one has actually come up and said, "we're going to implement this - and its going to be ready by this date". I remain rather skeptical about the whole deal - especially when other wired technologies like ADSL have not reached the consumer market despite almost 2 years of beta testing. I know many would argue that the implementation of ADSL and wired broadband would take more time due to the fact that new cables need to be laid and the like, whereas 3G is wireless.
That is true enough, but you should also be asking yourself why the telecommunication companies would want to ditch their existing hardware just to be the first kid on the block to offer 3G. Many of these companies have invested a large amount of money in the development and implementation of WAP - and this has happened fairly recently as well. I seriously doubt they're about to throw all that away and switch to something completely new even before they've had a chance to recover from losses they might have incurred as a result of implementing WAP.
Perhaps I'm just a little bit cynical. I want to believe - but the current trends that I've been seeing aren't very encouraging. We'll certainly see 3G in Malaysia, but the question isn't about will we or won't we but more of when.
1.) Chasing the Wind (part 1) - Robert G. Farrell
2.) What's brewing with 3G? - Dhillon Andrew
3.) A look at DNS (part 2) - L33tdawg
4.) Chasing the Wind (part 2) - Robert G. Farrell
