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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!
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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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...