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Beyond 3G — Practical Cellular Internet Access
PreacherTom writes "For years 3G, or 'third generation,' denoted some future wireless utopia where voice, data, and video would all merge into a wondrous amalgam, marked by snazzy phones that do everything perfectly — and fast. There is indeed a new wireless utopia, and again, it's about merging voice, data, and all the other stuff at even faster speeds. It is known as High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, or HSDPA, and it has started appearing on wireless networks operated by companies such as Vodaphone in Europe and Cingular Wireless in the U.S. Meanwhile, South Korea's Samsung has even started building HSDPA-ready phones. The technology promises wireless speeds as high as 3.6 Mbps but in practice will be much slower than that — fast enough, though, to make wirelessly surfing the Web and downloading music and video well worth the effort."
The article seems information-free, largely hype with no substance, by someone who appears to have limited understanding of the issues. Even Vodafone is spelt incorrectly.
HSDPA is actually just an improved version of W-CDMA, the underlying air-interface standard used by the UMTS and FOMA 3G standards. It's an incremental improvement on W-CDMA, it brings more bandwidth but more importantly it brings lower (sub-100ms round-trip ping) latency. HSUPA is the "next step" from HSDPA (HSDPA concentrates on the downlink, HSUPA combines with HSDPA and improves the uplink) and brings better-than-DSL latency to UMTS.
There's nothing that revolutionary about the whole thing. It's still essentially "3G" (which is mostly a marketing phrase anyway) mobile phone technology. Bandwidth is still limited enough that you'll not see operators marketing it as a true alternative to DSL in the same way as, say, WiMax will be.
The article itself seems a little wierd. It's as if someone just found out about SMS text messaging and is enthused about it. HSDPA isn't new, it's been part of Cingular's UMTS roll-out for the two years or so they've been playing with UMTS. Nor is it significantly better or worse than EVDO revision A, which is being rolled out by Sprint at the moment (though there are advantages in the fact that HSDPA is generally implemented with UMTS at the upper levels, rather than the AMPS-derived upper-level protocols that IS-95/IS-2000 networks like Sprint's use.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I believe that this protocol allows for simultaneous data and voice, whereas EvDO allows for only one or the other. I think that's what my girlfriend explained to me (she's a Cingular employee). Cue the comments about my girlfriend teaching me about tech...
Phone-only service is boring, and doesn't need high data rates. Not only do most phones have screens that are too small (though a Treo has a bigger screen than the video iPods), but the audio on phones is mostly designed for telephony - low-bandwidth mono in one ear is not what you want for music. And many of the phone-only services seem to run walled-garden music access, which is also really lame. For listening to music, 128kbps is enough for most people, or at most 192.
But this is about data access, competing with emerging WiMAX services for fixed locations or Wifi access points for roaming users. I mainly deal with business users, who would *really* like to have some kind of wireless data access for smaller offices, so they can have some kind of backup to their T1 or DSL data lines. (The old solution was ISDN dial backup, but if the reason your access is down is that street construction takes out your main data line, it probably takes out your ISDN as well, and it's not uncommon that if a bad mux in the telco office takes out your main line, it also takes out the backup.) It's also useful for people who can't get good DSL or cable, whether that's a home user or a business office, store credit card authentication, etc.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks