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Is 3G Irrelevant?
An anonymous reader writes "Network Magazine asks 'Are We Better Off Without 3G?' in which the author notes that many networkers are giving up on 3G as a data services alternative due to high deployment costs and slower speeds vs. Wi-Fi. Given these issues, are we likely to see carriers like Nextel bypassing 3G for 4G technologies such as OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) by Flarion Technologies?"
hell, we don't even have 3g in the us at this time. we're still on 2.5g, hopefully to have 3g by the end of 2004-2005. with ntt docomo testing true 4g in japan recently, it makes you wonder why even bother with 3g?
if it wasn't for that horse, i wouldn't have spent that year in college.....
How about high USE costs? AT&T Wireless seems to think that I personally am going to pay the entire cost of building their network - $5.99 for a megabyte of data a month?
And meanwhile they're happily signing up Blackberries with unlimited data for peanuts.
Is it any wonder the average joe is telling them what to do with it?
I'd like to see mobile providers concentrate more on getting their 2G (voice) networks rolled out and matured across America and Canada. You in Europe are lucky -- you have almost 100% coverage. Here in America that is patently not the case - even in large cities such as San Francisco, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
Have you SEEN the GSM map of the US? Looks like a road atlas with smudges.
Fix what you have, mobile providers, and then start dreaming of 3G.
Zaphod B
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It's not any more irrelevent than IPv6 or .
Seriously, there will always be standards and technologies that make it from being in the right place at the right point of the implementation/budget curve and those that end up being skipped or never really fully implemented because it doesn't make sense for most to do so.
The end result of course is, if you didn't spend years on the standard yourself and your company isn't betting the farm on it, then: "Who cares?"
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
At least that's the view here in the UK, where the 3G services available here so far are being sold on the strength of picture messaging and video phone calls.
Unsurprisingly, sending a picture message or making a video call costs a lot more than sending a text message or making a regular call. New services generally command a price premium, so I guess that's to be expected, but what really gets my goat is how utterly useless (beyond the novelty factor) picture messaging and video calls are. Why use a picture message when a text message is so much clearer and 10-30 times cheaper? Why make a video call when a voice one will suffice at a fraction of the cost?
I'm sorry, but I want more from my next generation handset than just postage stamp sized pictures. And, if the current take up of 3G phones here and elsewhere is anything to go by, so does everyone else.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Given the huge investment in 3G licensing throughout Europe which nearly bankrupted many of the phone companies (and incidently made goverments such as the UK lots of £££)
I don't see 3G going away too quickly, the phone companies have too much invested to throw it all away and start again, video services are just starting to be offered, the companies CANT afford to use alternate systems.
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3G put huge debt every uk telecoms provider who signed up for it. Mobiles had stopped bringing in much *new* money, so new services seemed the next big step. As such, they acutely overpaid.
The discussions have been going on for years in the comms newsgroups, and the consensus from below is that its insanity to try and charge by the amount of data you use. Still, 3G has been rolled out with precisely this charging model.
Everyone is already acclimated to flat rate charging for internet; the idea of having to watch how much you are using makes 3G unnatractive; you have to keep "looking over your shoulder", and you dread the size of your bill at the end of the month.
Combine this with no killer app in site, and you have a pretty unnatractive package. Texting hoever continues to grow and grow...but you know this.
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4G is the future. It's supposed to be a combination of all these techniques. When I'm in a city I'm connected trought high speed Wi-Fi, when I get out of range i move seemless over to 2 Mbit UMTS (3G) getting further away I'm on 115k GPRS.
All this is great. The problem is how to get operators to cooperate, so I can move seemlessly between different networks and know what price i pay.
The main reason why we are seeing growing implementations of OFDM is because companies want to avoid Qualcomm's CDMA patents and the associated licensing fees.
Ask anybody in the know (who doesn't have a vested interest in seeing one of these technologies implemented) and they will concede OFDM is not inherently superior to to CDMA, or vice versa.
Although WiFi speed is irrelevant its existence still cause trouble to 3G deployments. WiFi hot spots just eats the bulk of the users in high population density areas and divert associated revenues from 3G. The business case for 3G is severely weakened.
From a speed point of view, it would make sense for carrier to skip 3G and go directly to 4G. But speed is not enough. They need an attractive application to get customers. Mobile Internet could be it provide they stop billing by usage as other posters have mentionned. They must also understand people will want to use the full potential of real Internet, not just the subset available through AvantGo and other WAP services.
There is also a need for a cheap PAN that can connect the PDA, the laptop and the mobile phone and also other portable devices such as digital cameras and camcoders as well as MP players. Customer would then move pictures, video and audio recordings over the net.