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."

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Re:Lack of substance

[gerhard]

Actually, KDDI in Japan already rolled out EVDO in December 2003. see: www.eurotechnology.com/3G/ [eurotechnology.com] Gerhard

Re:EvDO?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Mainly sold for PC Cards, not phones

[billstewart]

Here in the US, there are two main kinds of "data" plans - phone-only service (even if it's called "unlimited", it's still limited to your phone), and PC-usable service, either with PC-card (aka PCMCIA) or phone+USB/Bluetooth. Typical price ranges for "unlimited" service are $30 for phone-only and $80-120 for PC.

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.