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3G Cel Service Starts in Japan
Graymalkn writes "According to this story on the BBC, DoCoMo has finally launched the world's first 3G cellular service in Japan. Phones start at $560 and can go as high as $800 for one which can double as a video camera." Eventually they'll be able to watch movies on the new phones, but for now service for the phones is limited to a 20 mile radius around the center of Tokyo. I haven't found an exact number of bandwidth, but I believe it's like 384k downlink. To your phone. Once again, my jealousy runs rampant.
and the thing overheats in 15 min. Sounds pretty experimental to me...
sulli
RTFJ.
NTT DoCoMo is also cautious, expecting only one in every 10 subscribers to have a 3G phone in three years' time.
Wow, that statement really illustrates how Japanese think in the long term.
I hope, for their sake, that they can run legacy networks over the new backbone.
In Europe, providers say they will have to quintuple (x5) the density of antennas to support 3G... local community planners are very unhappy!
By the way, the phone's price will be less - networks subsidise the handset manufacturer's prices, based on the idea that you will spend craploads of cash when you actually use the phone.
No need to be jealous...
Take a piece of large paper. Cut a hole in it 1.5" by 2.25". Cover your monitor with this piece of paper. Now start using your computer like this and you will experience things just as if you had this service on a cell phone in your neck 'o the woods.
A while back I read somewhere (Slashdot I think) that the military was not releasing the frequencies that were originally allocated for 3G phones... Does this mean the Japanese will have 3G all to themselves while we suffer from 2.5G for the next 10 years??? Anyone out there know??? Is GPRS still gonna happen??
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
From http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/reuters_wir e/1530436l.htm
The standard model costs about 48,000 yen ($400) while the fancier video model costs about 68,000 yen ($570). The data model can be had for about 28,000 yen ($235).
+++ath0
GPRS phones are now on sale in the UK (and if we've got 'em, American's must have had them for ages!). However, it's currently still over a circuit-switched link - that is, the phone establishes a channel to the server, just like for a voice call or WAP, and then sends data down it, using PPP or summat similar. However, you still only get charged per kb (well, "only" - 1kb is very small, plus the minimum packet length is about 170 chars I think, so it'll cost a bomb - not for me yet). At least that's on this side of the Atlantic. Any Americans care to enlighten us?
Why on god's earth do I want to watch a movie on my cellphone? Convergence, as with all things, is best in moderation. The irony of this is that we'll have people watching movies on cellphones and talking on cellphones in movies. Then after the movie is over they'll get in their car and watch TV and talk on their phone WHILE they are driving.
Theory: it was recently demonstrated that multi-tasking causes the human brain to be less efficicent. An increasing tendancy to do more than one thing at a time will lead to an overall reduction in the productivity of humanity. Because the time we spend will be less productive we will have to spend more time partially working in order for us to achieve the same output. This will lead to more multi-tasking. Wash, Rinse, Repeat...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
However, once the spectrum disputes are over and the major players are back to their money-grubbing game, i'm guessing 144 kbps - 320 kbps would be the entry level bandwidth here in the states, mostly because it would require the least amount of transitional work in the packet switching department...
Meanwhile much of the rest of the world struggles to get clean water and electricity. Just a reminder that you need to keep your geek-goodies envy in perspective.
--hongpong.com
Well now, good for the Japanese, another wicked cool new wireless implementation for a country that is already lightyears ahead of the rest of the world. I wonder how long before the Europeans get 3G, though - I heard it's been a bit of a boondoggle over there.
But what I really want to know why the US is so far behind when it comes to the wireless world. While I don't labor under any sort of naive notion that the US has to be first in *everything* worldwide, this has perplexed me for some time. I don't think it's the technology, is it? Here are some ideas of mine, but I don't know how well grounded they are:
1.) Settlement in the US is much less dense than Japan or Europe, so there are greater infrastructual expenses involved with new wireless standards
2.) The NIMBY crowd in the US is more vocal than elsewhere and holds up new infrastructure installations
3.) Standards are more tightly controlled in Europe/Japan, meaning instead of three cellphone antennas for three different carriers on top of apartment buildings, perhaps there is one shared by all?
4.) For cultural reasons Americans are not as interested in games, instant messages, internet, and video as Europeans & the Japanese
-Adam in Philly
(who still uses a single band PCS phone made in, like, 1997 or something)
I know this was one of the proposals when the 3G specs were first being drawn up -- have a single standard that TRULY is worldwide.
For instance, when I'm travelling in Japan, I need a PDC phone that is proprietary to Japan, when I'm in the states, I need a Sprint CDMA phone (GSM in the states sucks), when I'm travelling in the rest of the world, I need a GSM 900/1800 phone, etc...
Is this still the plan, or do we still have to deal with a hodgepodge of incompatible standards?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
First of all, could we have this submission translated into English for those of us who don't breathlessly read news sites for information about telephones? "DoMoCo" must be a company, but what's "3G"? Third generation?
Second, video cellphones? Doubles as a camera? So how does that work? I pull the phone away from my ear and hold it up to my face so I can see a 1 in^2 image of my friend (and he can see me) then quickly jam it back to my ear so we can talk? Until the device overheats or the battery goes dead?
Video phones over *regular* lines exist today but nobody is buying them. Why would I want a video cellphone?
324006
Not to mention that if you develop better technology, we have the technology to destroy it.
Here are the specs from the DoCoMo web site. 64 Kbps for real-time video, max 384K bps downlink, 64K bps uplink. Decent (but not great) battery life, too.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Here's my prediction ("All the authority and accuracy of Gartner (i.e. None) without the cost" (TM)):
/. as of late. The infrastructure cost for some 801.xx network is *much* less than 3G service. Its a fairly open protocol, so you won't get locked into Sprint / AT&T / WorldCom / et al's service.
3G is going to be dead in the water, at least for the next few years (5-10) here in the states. Why?
Because what it delivers can be done for MUCH less money. High speed wireless *is* a very cool thing, and very desirable. The problem is the cellular phone isn't the application for it. In reality, who wants to watch a movie on a small screen if you have to pay for it? Who wants to pipe music down the phone if you have to pay for it? These services are not going to be cheap (someone's got to pay for all of those licenses). What reason does a cellular *need* 300+kbps?
The only reason you would want that speed to your phone is if you have it hooked up to a PDA or a laptop. That's the only "killer app" I see for high speed internet. And if that's the case, there are better and cheaper ways of doing it. Think the "Freenets" that have been talked about on
I see cellular service sticking with 2.5 G here in the states. That allows you to do all the things that are a cellphone actually does well (voice, some limited data: e-mail, texting, *simple* WAP). For high speed data that you'd need for your laptop/PDA, look for the commercialization of 801.xx (or something similar).
So says the Bastard
If you add GPS (as in the E911 service in the other article today), you not only location-based advertising, but location-based information.
"you're currently at bus stop #445... there will be a bus there in 2.3 minutes, time enough for you to get a coffee at Starbucks, 27m around the corner. There is a lineup of 2 people currently, and average serving time is 43 seconds."
It's not THAT far fetched... and although advertising pays for many of these services, it's not necessarily a bad thing in all cases (if handled right, and opt-in).
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
As in NEVER. Ever.
Why? - well damn if they can send a man to the moon then those there geekers in NAZER should be able to get me mah TV phone lika Dick Tracy.
There is simply too much money to be made with the crappy service you already get and no incentive to cooperate in billing or roaming systems. I mean who do you think actually bought the congressmen and the FCC leverage? The phone companies.
Look at it another way. The spectrum auction drove the prices so high that phone companies no longer have the billions of dollars it would take to actually deliver the service. And you know what? That was the plan. Keep it on the shelf and off the market from anyone else so they could suck dollars for 1G 2G service now.
In Finland the maximum bandwidth of GPRS networks will be something like 20 - 30 kilobits per second during the next few years. This is due to the lack of advanced coding schemas (the starndards are here for up to 155kbps but no-one has implementations) and not allocating all 8 timeslots of the communication channel for GPRS (this will, however, not be the case in other countries shere GSM is not used as much as here).
However, if they really have the WCDMA working it's something very cool. And bloody expensive.
Source: GPRS for Application developers course at Ericsson last summer.
-Panu
..they already have a 3G PCMCIA card available.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
I won't care one bit about 3G until I can actually get a call through in a real-world setting. It's very common that I have to redial the number 5-10 times in downtown San Francisco during peak hours just to get through the network congestion. For providers who have oversold their service, everyone competes for a channel in their overloaded cell. And now they want to increase the bandwidth? How about taking the 256Kbps or 2Mbps or whatever the hell the limit is and use it to support more channels?
ObProvider: Cingular Wireless
http://www.djw.org/information/palm8290.html
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Actually, some countries countries that are way ahead of us like Finland, have a REALLY low density. We're talking 17 people per sq/km.
So why does Finland and other low density countries have such a high density of cellphones (>65 cellphones per 100 inhabitants)?
Standards, Standards, Standards! Can you imagine if NetBIOS, IPX, and TCP/IP were all competing for WAN protocol usage on the Internet? The internet would be mostly useless. Buying different routers and adapters for compatibility, and still not be able to have an AIM go through each type - imagine!
Most countries in the world (exceptions being North America, Japan [PDC], South Korea [CDMA]), standardized on GSM for digital cellular.. and this was already back in 1992. Hence, there is probably 150 million GSM customers already, who can all roam between networks. The FCC eventually allowed GSM in, much against Motorola's liking, but on the 1900MHz band, thus making interopability a pain in the ass.
Take America for instance, while AMPS (analog) is dying for the most part as a protocol, you've still got CDMA (Alltel, Verizon), TDMA (AT&T - who is moving to GSM 1900 whenever the economy fixes up), iDen (Nextel), GSM 1900 (Cingular). That means, to cover all these phones, you need *5* base stations. Not only that, other than AMPS compatibility, phones do not generally allow for compatibility between them. So, you've got 5 types of phones manufacturers of all this equipment has to make up for.
GSM isn't the best, but it means real roaming with real coverage! I can take my Motorola Tri-Band GSM phone, and roam between Cingular in the US, Telia in Sweden, and whoever in Uganda. I can send SMS's between any GSM customer around the world. Try having a Verizon customer send a GSM to a Cingular customer.
3G is the 'final solution' to this incompatibility mess I'm told. We'll see
IANACE (I am not a cellular engineer, just some one fed up with cell phones.. flame away at my ignorance!)
Sure, it's nothing to do with the fact that your phone system is owned by fat stupid monopolies who have bribed congress into introducing legislation to prevent competition. There is no corruption in the US, there's no need for corruption in a country where one can legally buy your policians. Oh wait, all those multi-million donations are made with no expectation that it will influence policy, of course, silly me.
Also, it's nothing to do with the fact that public education in the US is so crappy you have to import foreigners from ineffective "socialist" countries just to keep the infrastructure from falling apart. Your engineers/scientists are mostly second generation Americans or foreigners. Upper echelon natives become lawyers, bankers, or PHBs. Lower echelon Americans become ??? but not engineers. Somehow India and Russia can afford to churn out 100000s of competent engineers a year, but America is too efficient to do that. It's more efficient to let those silly socialists have state subsidised college education. That way the US can keep corporation taxes low, but make sure there are enough techs to keep things running. It's great - the owners get very rich. It leaves ordinary Americans on the slag heap, but who cares about that.
No, it's because America is just too big, after all it's always the smaller counties with advanced technology, those little Carribean states must have teleporters by now.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
They have cell towers that are made up to look like trees. They're typically much less attractive than artificial Christmas trees, which I don't like to begin with.
Those Damned things are uglier and catch my eyes more than regular radio towers.
I know its off topic but these things are so ugly, its got to stop. No more fake antennas. If you want to disguise cell phone antennas, the best way is just to mount them on top of buildings. If buildings are not available - capitalize on topographical features. If the area is completely flat without any buildings, build a cell phone tower to make it more interesting.
You need 5 base stations because you have 5 carriers. This has nothing to do with different standards, each carrier would need their own towers even if they all were GSM.
Also, the fact that 900/1800MHz GSM is not available in the US has to do with spectrum allocation. I believe that these bands are used for something else here, unlike the 1900Mhz band that was eventually allocated for cellular phones.
On the other hand, we have fixed-price broadband and you...don't. And likely won't, ever.
Sorry, you lost me there. Who doesn't have fixed price broadband? I can't speak for Asia, but I know in Sweden broadband is everywhere - and I have never seen it for anything but fixed price. Generally speaking you are talking about 250 SEK (25 USD) for 512k down.
There are providers who don't even bother with DSL or cable. Take www.tele2.se and www.bredbandsbolaget.com who are installing ethernet connections to homes. I have one in mine - a little socket beside the front door. According to Bredbandsbolaget it will go live this month. Oh and they cost 495 SEK (49.5 USD) setup and 200 SEK (20 USD) per month.
It's my personal opinion that 3G is only going to be really useful in Japan and the technofetishist desire for it's use here is just silly. I mean look at it, what the fuck are you going to use a 384k download for on a fucking cell phone? We don't have anything remotely like i-mode here in the states, you might respond with wireless internet but i-mode is NOT the internet. The closest thing you can compare i-mode to is AOL in 1995. You paid for AOL access and got exactly that, access to AOL's internal network. Everything was hosted and maintained by AOL. I-mode though lets individual companies put up i-mode pages and allows for a pay per byte akin to charging by the minute on a 900 number. This is very different than in the US where we're trying to adapt either our phones or the internet for use on the phones. From the onset i-mode was designed for the phones and likewise the phones designed for i-mode. It is feasible in Japan to have high bandwidth connections on mobile devices because they are being charged by the byte (or packet I suppose) so they aren't going to hook up a phone to their laptop and download the latest Linux ISO. That is almost exactly what most people want to do with 3G networks assuming they proliferate in the US due to some miracle involving bandwidth and the military. Any time 3G networks are mentioned here everyone goes into "DSL replacement" mode where they look for yet another avenue of broadband. If DoCoMo somehow offered i-mode here but charged by the byte or packet nobody would use it because we've gotten too used to the internet essentially being free.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
GSM in the states only sucks if you live in the States. I have a dual band GSM 900/1900 phone (the Nokia 8890) and live in Europe. I have excellent access whenever I visit the US (which is often) as I usually remain in metro areas.
Even things like retrieving voicemail and full SMS back home is fully supported.
As far as I am concerned, global roaming is here now. What is really missing though, is a) cheap roaming (the roaming charges are ridiculously expensive the world over), and b) cheap data access. My provider charges me for data access outside my 100 free minute plan, and data access while roaming, that's just out of the question, financially, not technically. 2.5G or 3G hopefully may solve that...