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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."
Yea, so my 14.4 modem isn't useless after all! What's that you say .. megabits? What's that?
And I still can't make a cell call from home....
"Will we soon be able to download music or videos on our cell phones?"
;)
Us Brits (ok I am welsh really!) have been able to do this already. Three a mobile company here in the UK has been selling handsets and access for a while that provides music/maps/video downloads and calls.
"In Europe, we are now using GPRS, or general packet radio service, also known as 2.5G. And we are limited to 30 kilobits a second."
Note this bloke is from france which is in europe, but a backwater in most things!
Note that the testbed for the DoComo handsets is in Cambridge...UK.
All together now... God save our gracious queen....
This new technology will not arrive in Europe before 2006 at least.
Japan now and in europe in 2006 -- early extrapolations of this trend indicate that this technology will splash into the north american market as early as 2032.
Lets keep our fingers crossed.
"All European operators are eventually expected to move to 3G networks to ensure that there is enough capacity to handle voice and increased data traffic."
I don't think it will be introduced in Europe in the near future. Even WAP is a total disaster here. When will these people learn that we don't need 14.4 Mbits on our cellphone? We just want to make a call and send SMS. Japanese people may like the newest gadgets but in Europe, people do not get excited by this technology..
History matters..
It would be nice to have an mp3 player that you could travel with and continuosly download music to without having to dock it to a stationary PC.
other than that and multiplayer gaming, what cell phone applications possibly need this bandwidth?
They are having a hard time coming up with useful applications for current cell phones with gprs as it is.
Will code a sig generator for food
but we'd prefer broadband in our home for less than a kidney/month and have it *now* instead of 14Mb in our cellphones in 3 years.
How come greece sucks so much that we're the only goddamn country in europe that still hasn't got dialup.
i pay fucking E100/month for sucky dialup.
you really think this 3g shit is going to make us happy?
get lost.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
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?
But, 14.4Mbps?!?!?! AWESOME! That is faster than my AirPort card! Unfortunately, if DoCoMo follows the same pricing methods as it did for FOMA (their 3G service), then this is something I will never be able to afford. They don't have a flat rate unlimited connection plan, but rather charge based on the amount of data you download (I pay DDI Pocket 10,000 yen per month for unlimited access and I probably abuse it...expensive but worth it for the mobility IMO).
PLEASE, DoCoMo, give us a decently priced flat rate unlimited connection plan. I would seriously consider paying around 15,000 yen per month for something like that at this speed.
BTW, I am currently a DoCoMo customer for my phone service. It isn't too expensive and my only complaints are the 500 character mail limit and the slow connection for iMode (my phone is 2 years old and only connects at 9600bps). But the coverage is AWESOME...and good thing for me since I will be spending a few months travelling around Japan by bicycle and I don't want to be caught without a signal in an emergency situation (speaking of which, any /.ers in Japan want to give a poor American traveler a place to crash for a night? email me).
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Ok, when is this going to be introduced in Europe? Let's make it a bet. I bet 100 slashdollars (the virtual currency used here at slashdot) that it will not be introduced before 2015.
The reason I'm saying this is that most introduction dates for new communication technologies are far too optimistic.
For instance, UMTS was supposed to be introduced by now. Haven't seen it yet. That miscalculation nearly bankrupted KPN Telecom (the Dutch telephone co.). Every home a (A)DSL connection? It's coming but not quite. Every youth an i-Mode? Nope.
Problem is: introducing a new communication protocol usually requires a new infrastructure and that requires a lot of money. And when it is all about investing people (and especially europeans) like too wait for the competitor to make that investment.
Hence my skeptisism.
When we can get less dropped calls and actually get decent cell phone coverage away from the interstates. Check out the cell maps of the major carriers, they all hug the lines created by interstates. You go to a rural area like I'm from and the coverage is crap. IMHO the feature set of cell phones is starting to creep into the "that's cool, but I don't think I'll ever need it" category. The camera phones have got to the be worst.
This space for rent.
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!!
Nicely argumented view. I especially like your references to numerous studies on the subject. And thanks for making it clear to me that I don't want mobile wideband-applications.
Phew, I think I'd better go crawling back to the local landline monopoly and beg them to re-install a landline connection.
You get this. Companies advancing technology to offer better services to stay ahaead of their competition.
:-(
It's a damn shame not a lot of this happens in the U.S. anymore.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Verizon Wireless is testing EVDO (Evolution Data Only) in the beltline area of Washington State.
z il la-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf- 8
:)
While it does not promise 14 megabit speeds (What you gonna run slashdot off it?) it will do 600Kbit while moving and 2.4 megabit stationary.
I think also there's an expansion out in San Diego also.
http://www.google.com/search?q=EVDO&sourceid=mo
Edumacate yourself
Assuming that by the time the networks get built we can use fuel-cell batteries, then the problem will be heat build-up. Can you imagine a phone with a fan? Heat pumps are little help, because they can only move heat from inside to the case, and you can't have the phone getting too hot to hold. "Are you happy to see me, or is that a 4G phone in your pocket?" I suppose ice fisherman could use them to keep their hands warm.
Before these things could become practical we would need asynchronous-logic chips or spin-coupled logic, both over a decade off.
The days of defrauding investors are far from over.
"all you 'rich' assholes want Internet. You are LUCKY to have a phone! Now get out!"
Nice? And then the chief technician (of a 200.000 people area in Athens) comes and tries to be a 'techie' , only to make you understand that his knowledge of modems is stuck to the ones seen in 'Wargames' (seriously).
But we have ISDN you might say... well.. when the 2 technicians came to my house to do the installation, i was told that the 'idiot' electrical engineer had made it impossible for the line to work. I told them to leave the Network Terminal device and get out, then i installed it myself. (And i am not a techie).
But they are not just ignorant idiots, they are also cheating bastards. When the phone company (OTE) started selling special low rate numbers for Internet connectivity (EPAK) they only sold to their subsidiary (OTENET) and not to other ISPs. All they paid was a 150000 Euro's fine (small money to what they gained. Customers of OTENET paid less money on they phone accounts than other ISP's).
The stories i can tell you about the phone company in Greece would make most slashdoters cry in agony with the prospect of ever coming to the banana country.. err.. Greece.
But! to be fair, the Mobile phone infrastructure is actually quite good!. 3G is coming, and GPRS (2,5G) has been here for years.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
Japan might have a market for it, but I have difficulty believing anywhere else does.
Simple question:
If I can't use my cell phone in the basement, on the elevator, wherever... how can I continue to put more and more important data on its network?
The phone companies will never have an incentive to serve my basement (at work)... so what I really need is some kind of inexpensive repeater... 802.11x or whatever.
Since the idea of active repeaters (as opposed to remote antennas in a high-rise to improve reception) is so contrary to the way the telephone industry works, how are we ever going to get "cooperating networks," where the data flows on the best possible path?