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Just In Case 3G Isn't Speedy Enough
Roland Piquepaille writes "Will we soon be able to download music or videos on our cell phones? Yes, with the arrival of the next 3.5G technology, as reports Jennifer L. Schenker in this International Herald Tribune article. "NTT DoCoMo Inc., the Japanese company that introduced the first third-generation digital mobile phone service in the world, is preparing to pioneer wireless services that are at least 40 times as fast." DoCoMo will use "a technology called HSDPA, for high-speed downlink packet access, also known as 3.5G, [which] is expected to deliver data at as much as 14.4 megabits a second." This new technology will not arrive in Europe before 2006 at least. Check this column for a summary."
We have had 3G introduced here in the UK and so far it is awful. The handsets are expensive, the service is expensive, the battery life is very poor, the phones don't play mp3/ogg, the reception is extremely bad and you cannot get "The Internet" on the system either (they don't like you talking about that).
.COM boom which will never make its money back.
Call it what you like and make it as fast as you like but no-one is biting. It is an expensive technology conceived and financed at the height of the
Our biggest telecoms company wrote off the £9-billion license cost last week to try and stimulate the market. Guess what...no change.
The first commercial vendor of 3G (a company called "3") has already resorted to pron to try to raise interest.
Save your money, buy more memory or a bigger screen, or send your money to Ethiopia, but don't waste your cash on this junk it will only disappoint.
I've even seen some documents out of DoCoMo themselves that suggest they're thinking of moving toward a system that allows smooth roaming between high-bandwidth (1 Gbps) hotspots and a wide-area cellular system for a future 4G network.
Can anyone familiar with this standard enlighten me as to how Wi-Fi and related technologies figure in it?
According to the investor relations PDF here (in Japanese!), HSPDA was released in March 2002 as part of the FOMA initiative.
It also says the maximum data transfer rate is 14Mbps. Which is not the same as throughput.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Sure, these handsets are 14.4 odleplexes of bandwidths per second, on paper.
I have had a chance to play with a next gen DocoMo handset, and the video - while strictly geek appeal only and something I would deliberatly turn off for every day use so I don't have to shave - was watchable only until you started moving, then it just breaks up. The faster you go the worse the picture - by the time you get up to car+ speeds you are restricted to voice only calls.
They also seem to have a massive latency, far worse than my 14.4k/sec CSD dial up mobile connection, and that's only 1p/min. 3.5G might be good for the odd small file or even some streaming formats, but for SSH it blows.
It would be interesting to find out what compression they use for it - probably something that is as light on the CPU as possible, but that really shows in the transmission quality.
The telecomms industry could do with starting from the ground up (rather than building off the technologically suspect CDMA or GSM systems) with a new, open standard 100% packet based network with IP6 support - then and maybe then the internet (and related services) on a mobile level could become a killer app. Until then they would be best off sticking to voice calls and massivly overcharging for SMS.
Beep beep.
Uau, just think of this: my current operator charges 0,02 per 1024 bytes with GPRS connections. (Portugal, Optimus)
/sec.
That's right, you read it correctly, it's 0,02 per 1024 bytes!
At these prices 14.4Mbps is almost 2000
Jesus Christ, I hate those christians!!