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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....
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?
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.
And nobody is buying them. The salespeople standing outside the Three shops in London look more desperate everytime I walk past. The introductory special offers have been extended in an attempt to boost flagging sales.
Mobile phones and SMS meet a basic need for communication, 3G and video phones don't really add anything to this. Look at the desperate advertising campaigns from Three etc trying to convince us that it's cool to be able to see someone while talking. Nobody is advertising 3G as 'useful' or talking about features - it's all image.
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.
Note this bloke is from france which is in europe, but a backwater in most things! ;)
That's right! We in the UK have an increadible insight into France and the rest of Europe, due to the unbiased, honest reporting of our wonderful press. Those Europeans are trying to take away 1,000 years of British sovereignty, because, erm, they're jealous of us. Or something. No, I've got it! They're backwards and so need to reign the UK in with silly straight banana rules to be able to compete with us. After all, the UK has the largest economy in Europe, because we don't have silly European laws. Probably.
God bless the Queen. And Bush.
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!!
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.