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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?"
I just tried to visualize that... I think I burst an artery.
All new technology is irrelevant until it is taken up by the public.
OFDM is an encoding, not a protocol. Both Wi-Fi and WiMax (802.16) use OFDM, and I wouldn't be surprised if 4G (802.20) systems end up using it as well.
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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.....
As a daily user of Nextel's services, I think they should be concentrating on improving the reliability of their service before they even think of what technology they are going to move to next.
Most people have no desire to pay for another upgrade to their voice service. This is a lesson that must be learned, and re-learned. Customers don't want convergence unless it is cheaper than the sum of the parts. Joe Average is fully prepared to pay $40 each for 3 products and services that give him exactly what he wants, but is unwilling to pay more than $80 for one product and service that provides the total package.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
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
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
Ok, first of all, wi-fi is great and all but it's range is very limited, and the lack of regulation means that no one can 'own' any piece of spectrum. The range is so small that it would only have a chance of working in dense city places, while cell phone towers can handle miles of land. If anything Wi-fi will augment standard 3g connections when available.
And second of all, what the hell is OFDM? I've never heard of it. Why link to the company page and not a page that actually explains what it is? And anyway, FDMA/TDMA/CDMA are not 'g' technologies, but rather the underlying technology behind them. A new modulation technique (if it turns out to be useful) would take a long time to roll out. CDMA took four or five years before it became all that wide spread.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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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I carry around my own spool of fiber wherever I go which is plugged into a SONET backbone at my apartment...yes I get some stares as I unspool the orange cable while walking down the street, but at least I got 10Gbit/sec of bandwidth at Starbucks rather than having to use their paltry WiFi! ;-)
-psy
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.
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Cliff: Ok, well we need SOMETHING to sell them on.
Ralph: Dude, I am so ahead of the game, check this out: Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing.
Cliff: Now that's good, worth at least 50Mill! How did you think of it?
Ralph: I just scrambled the letters of the ingredients from a Taco Bell hot sauce packet.
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The US never was in large parts.
It was almost like a trip back in time when I moved from Europe to the US. Why?
A lot of the appliances etc. etc. are technology wise WAY behind the stuff you can buy in europe standard.
TV's same thing. 16:9 (Pal PLUS) is pretty much standard and you can get TVs for a decent price (HDTV? Yeah right).
Mobile phone? Things like "SMS" that are not touted as the "next big thing" in the US is something I had almost 10 years ago in Europe.
Reality is that a lot of high tech companies are in the US, maybe even do their research here, but ironically enough it's mostly foreign places who profit from it.
Sure, high-tech is available in the US (and sure, if it exists SOMEWHERE and can be bought you can most likely buy it in the US as well) but for the average Joe that isn't the case.
What does 3G have to do with Wi-Fi? 3G is a phone standard. You get 3G stuff anywhere you can use your phone. Wi-Fi is a wireless LAN standard. You need a pringles can to use it from two doors down the street. They're completely different technologies, designed for two completely different things, how can one make the other irrelevant?
-JDF
Chief among these are:
- Packet-switched operation. To transmit data (except SMS messages) it's necessary to open an end to end virtual circuit. So you can't trickly information back and forward to the phone all the time, at a very low bandwidth (and consequently very low cost). And there's no multicast, so software download to each phone has to be done one at a time.
- Location-specific services. "Where am i?", "Where is the nearest gas station?", or that DoCoMo fave "beep me when a single girl my age who also likes ninja manga is nearby".
These don't need 3G's bandwidth, but the 2G network can't really deliver either. If the phone companies had been conservative and added the above, they'd be in clover. That's not just 20-20 hindsight - DoCoMo in Japan did both, and they're making enough money to actually pay for the 3G network they're building - and simultaneously getting their consumer base onboard with the idea of getting games, media, etc. on their phone.## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
the next phone i buy will be purchased for one of the following two reasons, and they're the only ones :
1. it's smaller and more comfortable to carry in my pocket, without being microscopic.
2. lets me plug in my laptop and use the cellular network for data transmission at a reasonable speed for as long as i want, up to my alotment of minutes. a friend of mine has a phone that he can connect and use this way, but it's mercilessly slow and substantially limited in terms of how much use he can make of it.
i suppose it's possibel that public WiFi access will become common in the city, so i guess that'd reduce the need, but i'm not holding my breath.
who wants a damn video phone is my question? i don't quite see how this adds value to my life. then again, i only just bought my first cell phone 9 months ago, so maybe 6 years from now i'll think 2.5G/3G is pretty cool, when everyone else is picking up their holoCell-9000's or something.
Couldn't agree with you more. I have a SonyEricsson P800 running GPRS, and I can use it to check stock prices and sports scores, and, at a pinch, to send email. But in reality, I don't need to use it that much.
If I need to contact someone when I am out in a car, then I can call them. Almost any situation when I am going to do something that I normally do on a computer (eg. edit/read documents or spreadsheets) I am going to want to sit down and do it, whether I do it on my phone, or on my laptop. And any phone that is small enough to be portable is going to be too small to be useful for anything that needs a decent sized screen and a keyboard. Is it so important to be able to send an email from the bus stop? More importantly, you aren't going to be compiling a megabyte sized spreadsheet or document in the brief intervals when you are completely unable to sit down and take out your laptop, or get to an internet cafe.
These limits mean that I don't need that much bandwidth - if you haven't got that much screen to fill, then fewer pixels are required, which means fewer bytes. I've been at conferences with mobile operators, and the only use that these guys can claim for 3G is video, and increasing the amount of bandwidth so they can have more 2G users on their network at one time. I remember having similar conversations with them about WAP - they were hard pressed to come up with an application that I could imagine myself, or a mass market, using. All they came up with for WAP was betting, and for 3G, it's sports highlights. My experience is that if you really care about a sports event, you are going to organise yourself so that you are near a TV while it's on. There is a high-end, limited niche, that will buy 3G to watch video while mobile, but you can't base a billion dollar investment on this segment.
My guess is that operators will roll out 3G networks, but they will be mainly used to increase bandwidth for 2G applications. No one wants video phones in the fixed wire world (except for high end users, who videoconference), and my guess is that they will not want them in the wireless one either. Some people will pay for sports video and similar, and there will be some revenue from this, like for pay-per-view sports. The problem for 3G is that it took so long in coming, that 2G had time to catch up.
About six months ago, I cancelled my two cell phones and decided to "rough it" for a while, saving money in the meantime. I haven't looked back. I never get rings in the middle of the night asking me to come in to work, never get the spousal unit 'checking up on me' periodically throughout the day and ruining my concentration, and I no longer have to answer tech support calls for my entire family whenever they can't get Windows to print a frickin' greeting card.
So, yes, 3G is irrelevant, unless you're tied to your cell phone like a dog to its master. <grin>
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
...is it just me or does it seem like WiFi is going to replace everything??
... different goals. 3G is the next step in mobile phone communications. Much like 2.5G (GPRS) was the next step after dialup gsm data connections. Ofcourse, having the 3G standard hyped as "Watch streaming DVD movies on your phone" or the likes doesn't help it much.
:) )
:D
It's weird. First, people complain about bluetooth, saying:
"Hey, Bluetooth is slower and doesn't have the range of WiFi, it won't have a future."
*duh* Bluetooth is a replacement for IRDA and cables. Which means that it has an entirely different set of goals than WiFi, thus, it supplements WiFi and should not be considered an alternative to WiFi. Works great for connecting my PDA to the internet using GPRS, or when I use the BT headset. Playing a game against a friend over bluetooth during a boring meeting is also nice (and doesn't look as strange as when you use IRDA and need to point the damn thing against eachother)
And now:
"3G is to slow/troublesome/expensive, lets use WiFi instead, its faster/easier/cheap"
Again, *duh*
Yes, I've tried it in real life (Malmoe/Sweden, using 3's phones & networks) and it works. Okay, so I might get a better image if I had a laptop + webcam + WiFi, but then, it isn't really that mobile, now is it? (Imagine making a call with that thing whilst riding a bicycle or something
Besides, if you compare the powerusage, you'll soon find that you probably wouldn't want a "wifi-phone".
To conclude this post, WiFi is great, but so is 3G and Bluetooth. They are all different technologies, designed to fit different goals. I for one would love having a PCMCIA card that did WiFi, 3G, BT and GPRS. This way, nomatter what, I could always, somehow, get online.
Anyway, this is my take on it... Bash away
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.
The mobile phone service providers are frantically adding extra features to their phones and networks to prevent cell phones from becoming a commodity. Companies don't want to compete on the prize because that cuts right into the margins. So they try to compete on value. If they stopped adding those features to your phone, cell phones could be treated like land line phones where it looks like the only reason to switch providers is to enjoy lower prices. When have you switched your home phone because somebody else offered a new/better feature not related to pricing?
"Light is faster than sound." - "Is that why people tend to look bright until you hear them speak?"
...beyond wireless email/messaging and web browsing.
So far we don't really have any applications. The overwhelming majority of mobile users have decided that the primary purpose of their devices, telephony, is perfectly adequate.
A remaining minority is content to get email or other text messages, but they're early adopters, pioneers and gadget freaks who buy anything and their aren't enough of them to make change-the-world money off of.
An even smaller minority have developed proprietary applications, but they've been doing that over more expensive technologies forver, this just lets them do it with greater freedom. They're not a growth medium, though, since they're generally large businesses that negotiate deep discounts and optimize for minimum usage anyway.
Right now there's just not a compelling application for wireless data at the price at which it is available.
A wireless technology with sustainable node throughputs in excess of 10 megabits and ranges equivilent to cellular and all-you-can-eat pricing would be compelling, but the application wouldn't be mobile as much as last-mile fixed, mobile data would just be a side benefit.
That technological development was seriously outpacing consumer need?
I admit a lot of these things are interesting, but just not practical. For instance, downloadable java games. I know atleast 25 people with cell phones... none of them play games on it. Why would you? Can't wait until you get home to your PC/PS2/XBox?
Sending pictures is pretty cool, but again it's very rare that I need to send someone a photo RIGHT NOW! I'll just get my digital camera, snap a photo, and e-mail it.
The only application on Cell phones I use besides actually talking is text messaging... that's rare, and definetly not 3G...
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.