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That's just plain wrong.

HSDPA latency is significantly lower than for UMTS, thanks to a couple of enhancements (Lower TTI, HARQ, etc). There's been a major effort to reduce latency in the 3G/3.5G systems in order to make VoIP viable.

http://www.umts-forum.org/component/option,com_docman/task,doc_download/gid,1632/Itemid,12/

Well, in the UK at least.
Some idiots
paid far too much for the 3G licenses.

The company 3 (3 pay, or £ PAY if you hold down shift) already provides 3G services, well if you can call them services.

The services are limited to a few crapy news clips, marketed music (e.g. music clips arn't, there just adverts), porn that you can't access etc...

All thease services cost a fortune, £3 for a few seconds of low-res porn, I can get better for free and then transfer it onto my phone. £0.50, for a poor rendition of some clasical music (which is out of copyright, so they make ~=100% profit).

3G prommised so much, location based services, fast internet access, office-home connectivity. Because they need to make sooooo much money back it's compleatly locked in , it's just an expensive, piss-poor tax on the public.

DON'T BUY IT, stick with WiFI, gprs and gps, which give provide great services at a low cost.

If this is true, you can read up on it here. It's some blurb by the coalition of companies involved in developing UMTS.

If I'm misreading you, please accept my apologies in advance.

the killer feature that hasn't emerged is a single, high speed, world-wide data standard.

You mean 3G aka 3GPP or UMTS.

Except it has been subverted by business interests and stakes such as W-CDMA, and CDMA2000, and patents held by Qualcomm.

Now that makes sense (you are definitely not a quitter!).

I do wish cell phone systems would give the other requirements a higher priority though (I guess I've had terrible service for too long). For users, those are the most important, because it translates into the percieved quality of the wireless service and phone, such as reliability, battery life, etc.

Of course total deregulation would definitely be worse than the current situation. Regulation is necessary, however I think that the politicians allocate the bandwidth with a main target of maximizing license fees (thus creating an artificial shortage, and the europeans are the worst in this respect) while reserving a disproportional large portion of the spectrum for non public uses. Regulation should be to protect the spectrum from abuse, but it's very much so a source of revenue which shifts the priorities of the regulators. Just look at how much innovation resulted from that unlicensed little band that was ruined my microwave interference anyway (2.4Ghz). Sure, wifi wan is spotty at best, but when and where it works, it's generating a lot of companies revenue, and its making a lot of users happy.

(yes you're right, noise is not a signal (by most definitions, because it is a common mistake...)).

Sorry to burst your bubble, pal, but it's "UMTS" not "UTMS". "UMTS" stands for "Unified Mobile Telecommunications System".

OK, bad spelling on my side - as long as we agree that we're referring to this.

UMTS is known as Wideband CDMA in the US and Japan.

Bad spelling aside, does this mean that there is current/future support for UMTS in the US and Japan? Now *that* would be cool...

..and while the U.S. finally get widespread GSM, several European countries have awarded UMTS licenses and expect to see commercial launch by 2001. At least we'll have a market for our obsolete GSM phones.. :D

In fact, it's not only Europe and Australasia, but Africa and South America too. Only North (and parts of Central) America and Japan do not use 900/1800 MHz GSM exclusively. Here's a list.

Soon, GSM will be enhanced by UMTS, which will allow for high speed wireless networking (2 mbit/sec), with other nifty services, making GSM even more useful than it already is.

Cheers,

Costyn.

Okay WAP is currently a bit slow (9.6k) and the content was thin to start with (although rapidly improving), but it works and it is here now. The European GSM infrastructure on which it relies offers coverage almost anywhere plus full roaming capabilities so location is not a problem.

What we have to look forward to in the very near future are a whole series of infrastructure technology refreshes which will offer "always on" connectivity at speeds of up to 114 kbps in the next 12 months (GPRS), then up to 384 kbps in the next 18 months (EDGE) and then approx 2 Mbps (UMTS) in the next 24 months. If you think we will all be using WAP browsers with tiny monochrome screens on conventional phones in that time period, then think again. And don't think that is all this is just vapourware and promises. All the major mobile telcos in Europe are busting a gut to deliver the benefits to their customers as soon as they can. So very soon, who will need a PC to access their content and applications?

Mobile 'phones have already entirely replaced land lines for a few people I know, and have become the primary contact for many others. Around 40% of the UK population own a mobile phone, I believe Finland leads the world with over 70% usage. Extremely competative markets have put pricing within reasonable reach for many unemployed and students, even school kids. Mobile 'phones are sold in pre-packaged boxes in supermarkets.
Part of this is because most European telcos stopped charging the mobile 'phone owners for receiving calls quite some time ago. I understand that this still isn't always the case in the US?
In the UK, the coverage is very good in reasonably densely populated areas, and weak only in the very least densly populated areas of the country.
With upcoming technologies like GPRS and UMTS, mobile data will become a sensible proposition. Given that the mobile phone operators need to make 370UKP (about $590) profit from every man, woman, and child in the UK to just cover the costs of the recent radio-spectrum auction, you can bet that the companies will be heavily pushing products suitable for everyone, from accessing AOL and shopping channels to real-time video conferencing. You can also bet that the 'web pads' and the like, will be using CPUs from Transmeta and ARM, and hopefully those that aren't running EPOC will be running a free O/S.