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Cingular To Offer Mobile High-Speed Internet
ArbiterOne writes "ZDNet has the story: Cingular is moving ahead with its plans to offer wireless high-speed Internet access to consumers. Lucent Technologies has agreed to provide the technology, and Cingular has agreed to buy out AT&T Wireless, and become the number-one cell carrier in the US."
Cingular is my cell phone company (at least until my contract expires) but their customer service reps are completely clueless about most of those little technical details such as how to get voice mail to work (they only know how to reset it). Forget it when it comes to "data" services. I have been told that I had to take my phone to an authorized service center (not my local phone store) to enter the IP address for data services. They would not give me the address to enter myself. Cluetrain doesn't stop here!
Many cellular phones feature browsers that were created on a whim, as a way of beefing up the features list prior to going on sale. Most Ericsson phones for instance have very poor browser functionality. A lot of the new phones coming from Nokia and Sony are light-years ahead of the first primitive attempts. A word of advice though - stay away from imported asian phones, they may look flashy and high-tech, but any are designed to be used for as little as a month before needing replacement.
Of course, this being slashdot, home of the technically adept, I feel obliged to mention the ultimate way to experience the internet on a cellular phone - via linux. Of course, this way is not for the faint hearted, but those steadfast in their dedication to that plucky Swede's OS will find that the Kyocera 1080 is admirably suited for an ultra-light linux distro, with built in internet functionality. If only I still had mine, I could truthfully claim to be making this post by cellphone!
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
It's not really for use with your mobile phone.
This is currently available in the UK. Which is a mobile modem for your laptop. Obviously there are other usages, like in car internet (not for the driver!), iPOD could connect to itunes to get tunes you want when out and about. It's not just about phones...
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1. When we say "high speed", what bandwidth are we talking about?
The article says: It has already signed up Lucent Technologies to provide equipment that currently supports data speeds of up to 2 megabits per second (mbps). The gear ultimately could support speeds of up to 14.4mbps.
2. How accessible is this high speed for today devices like say, mobile phones? Can I use my cell phone to browse at high speed?
No, it will be available for the yet to come 3G mobiles that have been promised for many years already. I have a feeling that we will need to wait more for them and when they become available they will be called 4G, skipping 3G. We have seen such thing a couple of times already.
there is an rss feed for slashdot...
http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss
it doesn't show the comments - but it is there
I'm quite surprised to see such an inept statement from ZDNet. UMTS is an umbrella term which covers the set of specifications for GSM, WCDMA and their interworking.
In this case, Cingular is focussing on WCDMA which, at the air interface layer has more in common with CDMA2000 than with GSM. WCDMA uses a CDMA-based air interface with upper protocol layers based on GSM (you could view this as like moving from copper Ethernet to fibre: the upper protocol is still TCP/IP, but faster...)
At the risk of starting a flame war, I think it's reasonable to say that today, GSM/WCDMA has a more highly evolved set of upper layers than CDMA2000, but CDMA2000 has a better optimised radio interface (EV-DO is considerably faster than the 384 kbit/s you can get with WCDMA - I know colleagues who consistently get around 800 kbit/s real data rates with EV-DO modems, where around 200 kbit/s is more realistic for WCDMA).
While, as explained above, I wouldn't like to characterise either CDMA2000 EV-DO or WCDMA as superior to the other, I think it is reasonable to state that EV-DO is the more mature and stable system right now. I use a 3G mobile in the UK, and there are still a few glitches around the edges, although things are improving rapidly (the main issue is handover between WCDMA and GSM, which is technically very challenging, and isn't an issue in CDMA2000 networks). I will say that if you're interested in data on the move, both EV-DO and WCDMA offer a user experience which is subjectively very similar to using a DSL connection, and is light years ahead of using GPRS (or CDMA2000-1X) in the performance offered.
HSDPA is at least a couple of years away from deployment in commercial networks, and probably won't initially work at 14.4 Mbit/s.
As for the issue of travelling... Well, WCDMA phones (almost) all have GSM capability, so will work in most parts of the world (the only place my GSM phone failed to work in the last five years was rural Laos!), and dual-mode CDMA2000 phones with GSM capability are extremely close to market, which will enable global roaming for CDMA users on GSM networks. From a practical point of view, users of either type of network will have the option of near global roaming.
I suppose I would summarise by saying that both systems are 'good enough' for most data users, and both will offer global roaming. Most people will probably be quite happy to choose based on price plan and phone they like best...
1) Verizon already offers high-speed mobile data access to customers in San Diego and Washington.
This is based on CDMA EV-DO. This technology gets 2.4Mbps peak (500Kbps average) on the downlink, and 153Kbps peak (80Kbps average) on the uplink. A nationwide rollout is expected later this year.
2) Sprint announced that they are going to do the same thing yesterday. They expect to have service later this year/early next year.
3) CDMA EVDO has been successfully deployed for the last 2 years in Korea (6 million subs) and for about 9 months in Japan (subs not known). Dozens of devices/phones are available.
4) Cingular's service is NOT based on GSM. This is the next generation of GSM (3G) which is based on CDMA technology. The complexities of this upgrade are much more than that of going from CDMA to EV-DO. W-CDMA will give you about 2Mbps peak (500 Kbps average) on the downlink, and far less on the uplink. This is over 3 times the bandwidth used by CDMA EV-DO.
Magnus.