| Pages in This Article: |
| 1. Introduction |
| 2. Deployment |
| 3. 3G Applications |
| 4. 3G Infrastructure Providers & License Race |
| Latest News |
| > Motorola
Opens Wireless Center in Spain > Caller ID Comes to TV > Media Player for Palm Released > Concept Kitchen Sells Handheld Accessory Line > Pervasive Restructures To Refocus on Databases more news... |
By Chan Komagan
Senior Associate,
Scient
June 30, 2000
There is yet another revolution emerging in the wireless technology industry. As subscriber growth continues to increase in US, Europe and rest of the world, carriers and infrastructure providers are facing a huge challenge in addressing bandwidth problems associated with this exploding capacity. The buzzword in the industry is 3G, the next-generation wireless standard that is expected to address the capacity issue as well as the disparate wireless standards. According to Cahners In-stat research, the fastest growth will be Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), despite the huge market share for GSM. The 3G technology has GSM roots from Europe and is expected to bring together diverse wireless standards like CDMA, TDMA and PDC. A lot of progress is taking place both in the GSM and CDMA markets, but, according to Forrester research, CDMA is growing at a faster rate than GSM and is being used in 4 continents.
The collective third generation technologies are often referred to as 3G services. IMT-2000 is the global body that co-ordinate the global standard and spectrum allocation for 3G services through World Radio Congress (WRC). The major challenge ahead for the carriers (telecom providers) to advance to 3G service is to establish an evolutionary path from the current 2G services to 2.5G and then to 3G. Most of the European players are already in the process of moving the current infrastructure from 2G to 2.5G. Some carriers like BT and Vodofone have the services complete and operational in Europe. In the US, Sprint is conducting a series of testing of their GPRS infrastructure. The carriers around the world will take 2 different ways to transition from 2.5 to 3G services. In Europe and Asia, the carriers take the GPRS or EDGE route, which will provide high-speed connectivity to customers. GPRS promises to provide always-on connection with a practical speed of 19.2Kbps. GPRS uses packet technology and it allows operators to maximize the efficient use of their networks by allowing multiple data subscribers to share channels on the network. Just as short messaging services take advantage of spare network capacity to deliver brief text messages, packet-based technologies are an extension of the same concept. The carriers are expected to move to third generation technology (UMTS) by late 2001.
In United States and the countries that support CDMA, the carrier will take an alternative path. They will adopt the cdma2000-1x standard, known as IS-2000, CDMA's 2.5G technology. Two of the carriers in US, Verizon wireless and Sprint PCS, are already in the process of deploying these services with the help of Qualcomm and Lucent. The cdma2000-1x provides a data rate of 153 kbps transmission suitable for a streaming video application. The CDMA2000 is a spread spectrum technology developed by Qualcomm. The first phase of CDMA2000, 1x will provide capability of 144kbps data rate and the second phase will offer more than 1.5Mb of data rate.
In Japan carriers like NTTDoComo has already started working on the 3G technologies. The much successful I-mode service uses packet data network (PDC-P). The carriers are expected to move to W-CDMA standard in late 2001.
The two prime candidates for the 3G standard will be Wideband-CDMA and Broadband-CDMA otherwise known as cdma-2000. Whatever the winning standard, they will both offer global, seamless communication. The 3G service will also support the newly upgraded IPV6 scheme as many device and infrastructure vendors raises concerns about the number of IP addresses the current Internet protocol can support.
By Chan Komagan
Senior Associate,
Scient
June 30, 2000
Asia and Western Europe are leading the way to 3G wireless technology with the US lagging behind them. Finland, Japan, and the United Kingdom will be first to market in deploying 3G according to the Strategis Group. These countries also are ahead of the U.S. in deploying so-called 2.5G services, which are considered interim steps to 3G. 3G service will support wireless access speeds as high as 384Kbps. Access with 2.5G service is half that speed or slower. The fastest commonly available wireless access speed currently is 19.2Kbps.
In 1992 the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) identified specific frequency bands for IMT-2000. Similarly, it is expected to identify additional spectrum to cater to the anticipated growth in broadband third generation services that will be in common use by the middle of the next decade. The GSM Association, the largest interest group in 3G, believes that in addition to the existing GSM and IMT-2000 bands, extension bands totaling about 190 MHz will be required for 3G applications. Such additional frequency bands would ensure global spectrum for everyone's mobile future.
Skeptics question the device capabilities in terms of memory and screen size in support for 3G features like video and audio. There are already a lot of announcements from wireless (handset) manufacturers like Nokia, Ericsson, Sony and Samsung about their new devices in support to 3G. But the analysts expect at least a year to see the proliferation of such devices that could take advantage of 3G services. These new devices should be designed to transmit and receive bandwidth intensive applications. There are 3 types of mobile devices that dominate the mobile devices market. They are
| Pages in This Article: |
| 1. Introduction |
| 2. Deployment |
| 3. 3G Applications |
| 4. 3G Infrastructure Providers & License Race |
| Latest News |
| > Motorola
Opens Wireless Center in Spain > Caller ID Comes to TV > Media Player for Palm Released > Concept Kitchen Sells Handheld Accessory Line > Pervasive Restructures To Refocus on Databases more news... |
By Chan Komagan
Senior Associate,
Scient
June 30, 2000
3G Applications
The 3G service will support more than basic features like voice, email, text, notifications and SMS. They will support a wide range of applications ranging from streaming video, multimedia and m-Commerce to file transfer.
> Audio Streaming
A number of music distribution companies have expressed interest in marketing music by providing downloadable channels utilizing UMTS (3G) services. The quality of the music transmission needs to be good and the combination of higher bit rate and compression techniques should ensure high quality reception. This type of service is not tolerant to delays, unlike SMS based email or messaging service. It is not clear how the distribution companies price this service at this time.
> Video Streaming
Video Streaming service will be similar to audio streaming and it is an another marketing channel for retailers and content distribution companies. UMTS will offer the standard desktop streaming speed and compression rate. Along with audio streaming, industry observers don’t expect to see this service in GPRS-based system, as it is too bandwidth-intensive.
> File Transfer
This is a general category of service that is designed to cover general information browsing. This application is delay tolerant and will be most probably priced based on the Mbytes used in the transfer.
Wireless 3G: The Future of Wireless
3G Infrastructure Providers & License Race -- Page 4By Chan Komagan June 30, 2000
3G Infrastructure Providers Infrastructure providers have a huge challenge in addressing the needs for 3G technologies. Two of the major providers, Ericsson and Nokia are competing to sell the 3G hardware/infrastructure products and solutions both in Europe and rest of the world to telecom providers like BT and Vodofone. Ericsson claims that the 3G technology will grow faster than expected, and, by 2004, 100 million people will use it for voice and data service. Ericsson launched its first macro base station using 3G WCDMA technology Both Nokia and Ericsson are actively involved in selling high-end 3G products, network solutions and operational support. They have already signed up with a number of telecom players in Europe and rest of the world. Race for 3G licenses Japan There are 3 contenders in Japan, NTT Docomo, DDI and J-Phone (a joint venture between Vodofone AirTouch, Japan Telecom and BT), who are vying to get the allocated 3 licenses from the government. Italy Five 3G licenses are expected to be awarded this year. The telecommunication regulator in Italy has set a price range of between US$173 million and US$273 million although it has already stated that it expects to receive US$1.4 billion – 1.98 billion for the five UMTS licenses. United Kingdom The total amount of money being bid for 3G licenses was over US$30 billion. There were seven bidders left for the five licenses being auctioned. The media, including the Financial Times of London and Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet, have questioned whether operators will be able to quickly recoup the costs of the licenses. Germany and Netherlands Both Germany and the Netherlands are expected to auction licenses in the second quarter of 2000. Germany is expected to auction four to six licenses in July, and the Netherlands is expected to auction five in June. United States Qualcomm and Sprint PCS have started trial service of 3G broadband wireless network services in the US market. The trials are for a CDMA 1x Multi-Carrier (MC) voice and data network. The trials will include testing and verification of the 144Kbps 3G data capabilities over the Sprint PCS network. 3G Time Scale
|
SOURCE MOBILE LIFESTREAMS
Chan Komagan is a senior associate at Scient. His expertise includes WAP, Bluetooth and other wireless technologies.
Like the GSM standard itself, GPRS will be introduced in phases. Phase 1 is expected to be available commercially in the year 2000/1. Point to Point GPRS (sending information to a single GPRS user) will be supported, but not Point to Multipoint (sending the same information to several GPRS users at the same time). GPRS Phase 2 is not yet fully defined, but is expected to support higher data rates through the possible incorporation of techniques such as EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution), in addition to Point-to-Multipoint support.
Applications
for GPRS
A wide range of corporate and consumer applications
are enabled by nonvoice mobile services such as SMS and GPRS. This section will
introduce those that are particularly suited to GPRS.
Chat
Chat can be distinguished from general information services because the source
of the information is a person with chat whereas it tends to be from an Internet
site for information services. The "information intensity" - the
amount of information transferred per message tends to be lower with chat, where
people are more likely to state opinions than factual data. In the same way as
Internet chat groups have proven a very popular application of the Internet,
groups of like-minded people - so called communities of interest - have begun to
use nonvoice mobile services as a means to chat and communicate and discuss.
Because of its synergy with the Internet, GPRS would allow mobile users to participate fully in existing Internet chat groups rather than needing to set up their own groups that are dedicated to mobile users. Since the number of participants is an important factor determining the value of participation in the newsgroup, the use of GPRS here would be advantageous. GPRS will not however support point to multipoint services in its first phase, hindering the distribution of a single message to a group of people. As such, given the installed base of SMS capable devices, we would expect SMS to remain the primary bearer for chat applications in the foreseeable future, although experimentation with using GPRS is likely to commence sooner rather than later.
Textural
and Visual Information
A wide range of content can be delivered to mobile phone users ranging from
share prices, sports scores, weather, flight information, news headlines, prayer
reminders, lottery results, jokes, horoscopes, traffic, location sensitive
services and so on. This information need not necessarily be textual- it may be
maps or graphs or other types of visual information.
The length of a short message of 160 characters suffices for delivering information when it is quantitative - such as a share price or a sports score or temperature. When the information is of a qualitative nature however, such as a horoscope or news story, 160 characters is too short other than to tantalize or annoy the information recipient since they receive the headline or forecast but little else of substance. As such, GPRS will likely be used for qualitative information services when end users have GPRS capable devices, but SMS will continue to be used for delivering most quantitative information services. Interestingly, chat applications are a form of qualitative information that may remain delivered using SMS, in order to limit people to brevity and reduce the incidence of spurious and irrelevant posts to the mailing list that are a common occurrence on Internet chat groups.
Still
Images
Still images such as photographs, pictures, postcards, greeting cards and
presentations, static web pages can be sent and received over the mobile network
as they are across fixed telephone networks. It will be possible with GPRS to
post images from a digital camera connected to a GPRS radio device directly to
an Internet site, allowing near real-time desktop publishing.
Moving
Images
Over time, the nature and form of mobile communication is getting less textual
and more visual. The wireless industry is moving from text messages to icons and
picture messages to photographs and blueprints to video messages and movie
previews being downloaded and on to full blown movie watching via data streaming
on a mobile device.
Sending moving images in a mobile environment has several vertical market applications including monitoring parking lots or building sites for intruders or thieves, and sending images of patients from an ambulance to a hospital. Videoconferencing applications, in which teams of distributed sales people can have a regular sales meeting without having to go to a particular physical location, is another application for moving images.
Web
Browsing
Using Circuit Switched Data for web browsing has never been an enduring
application for mobile users. Because of the slow speed of Circuit Switched
Data, it takes a long time for data to arrive from the Internet server to the
browser. Alternatively, users switch off the images and just access the text on
the web, and end up with difficult to read text layouts on screens that are
difficult to read from. As such, mobile Internet browsing is better suited to
GPRS.
Document
Sharing/Collaborative Working
Mobile data facilitates document sharing and remote collaborative working. This
lets different people in different places work on the same document at the same
time. Multimedia applications combining voice, text, pictures and images can
even be envisaged. These kinds of applications could be useful in any problem
solving exercise such as fire fighting, combat to plan the route of attack,
medical treatment, advertising copy setting, architecture, journalism and so on.
Even comments on which resort to book a holiday at could benefit from document
sharing to save everyone having to visit the travel agent to make a decision.
Anywhere somebody can benefit from having and being able to comment on a visual
depiction of a situation or matter, such collaborative working can be useful. By
providing sufficient bandwidth, GPRS facilitates multimedia applications such as
document sharing.
Audio
Despite many improvements in the quality of voice calls on mobile networks such
as Enhanced Full Rate (EFR), they are still not broadcast quality. There are
scenarios where journalists or undercover police officers with portable
professional broadcast quality microphones and amplifiers capture interviews
with people or radio reports dictated by themselves and need to send this
information back to their radio or police station. Leaving a mobile phone on, or
dictating to a mobile phone, would simply not give sufficient voice quality to
allow that transmission to be broadcast or analyzed for the purposes of
background noise analysis or voice printing, where the speech autograph is taken
and matched against those in police storage. Since even short voice clips occupy
large file sizes, GPRS or other high speed mobile data services are needed.
Job
Dispatch
Nonvoice mobile
services can be used to assign and communicate new jobs from office-based staff
to mobile field staff. Customers typically telephone a call center whose staff
take the call and categorize it. Those calls requiring a visit by field sales or
service representative can then be escalated to those mobile workers. Job
dispatch applications can optionally be combined with vehicle positioning
applications - such that the nearest available suitable personnel can be
deployed to serve a customer. GSM nonvoice services can be used not only to send
the job out, but also as a means for the service engineer or sales person can
keep the office informed of progress towards meeting the customer's requirement.
The remote worker can send in a status message such as "Job 1234 complete,
on my way to 1235".
The 160 characters of a short message are sufficient for communicating most delivery addresses such as those needed for a sales, service or some other job dispatch application such as mobile pizza delivery and courier package delivery. However, 160 characters does require manipulation of the customer data such as the use of abbreviations such as "St" instead of "Street". Neither does 160 characters leave much space for giving the field representative any information about the problem that has been reported or the customer profile. The field representative is able to arrive at the customer premises but is not very well briefed beyond that. This is where GPRS will come in to allow more information to be sent and received more easily. With GPRS, a photograph of the customer and their premises could, for example, be sent to the field representative to assist in finding and identifying the customer. As such, we expect job dispatch applications will be an early adopter of GPRS-based communications.
Corporate
Email
With up to half of employees typically away from their desks at any one time, it
is important for them to keep in touch with the office by extending the use of
corporate email systems beyond an employee's office PC. Corporate email systems
run on Local Area computer Networks (LAN) and include Microsoft Mail, Outlook,
Outlook Express, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Lotus cc:Mail.
Since GPRS capable devices will be more widespread in corporations than amongst the general mobile phone user community, there are likely to be more corporate email applications using GPRS than Internet email ones whose target market is more general.
Internet
Email
Internet email services come in the form of a gateway service where the messages
are not stored, or mailbox services in which messages are stored. In the case of
gateway services, the wireless email platform simply translates the message from
SMTP, the Internet email protocol, into SMS and sends to the SMS Center. In the
case of mailbox email services, the emails are actually stored and the user gets
a notification on their mobile phone and can then retrieve the full email by
dialing in to collect it, forward it and so on.
Upon receiving a new email, most Internet email users do not currently get notified of this fact on their mobile phone. When they are out of the office, they have to dial in speculatively and periodically to check their mailbox contents. However, by linking Internet email with an alert mechanism such as SMS or GPRS, users can be notified when a new email is received.
Vehicle
Positioning
This application integrates satellite positioning systems that tell people where
they are with nonvoice mobile services that let people tell others where they
are. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a free-to-use global network of 24
satellites run by the US Department of Defense. Anyone with a GPS receiver can
receive their satellite position and thereby find out where they are. Vehicle
positioning applications can be used to deliver several services including
remote vehicle diagnostics, ad-hoc stolen vehicle tracking and new rental car
fleet tariffs.
The Short Message Service is ideal for sending Global Positioning System (GPS) position information such as longitude, latitude, bearing and altitude. GPS coordinates are typically about 60 characters in length. GPRS could alternatively be used.
Remote
LAN Access
When mobile workers are away from their desks, they clearly need to connect to
the Local Area Network in their office. Remote LAN applications encompasses
access to any applications that an employee would use when sitting at their
desk, such as access to the intranet, their corporate email services such as
Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes and to database applications running on Oracle
or Sybase or whatever. The mobile terminal such as handheld or laptop computer
has the same software programs as the desktop on it, or cut down client versions
of the applications accessible through the corporate LAN. This application area
is therefore likely to be a conglomeration of remote access to several different
information types - email, intranet, databases. This information may all be
accessible through web browsing tools, or require proprietary software
applications on the mobile device. The ideal bearer for Remote LAN Access
depends on the amount of data being transmitted, but the speed and latency of
GPRS make it ideal.
File
Transfer
As this generic term suggests, file transfer applications encompass any form of
downloading sizeable data across the mobile network. This data could be a
presentation document for a traveling salesperson, an appliance manual for a
service engineer or a software application such as Adobe Acrobat Reader to read
documents. The source of this information could be one of the Internet
communication methods such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol), telnet, http or Java
- or from a proprietary database or legacy platform. Irrespective of source and
type of file being transferred, this kind of application tends to be bandwidth
intensive. It therefore requires a high speed mobile data service such as GPRS,
EDGE or UMTS to run satisfactorily across a mobile network.
Home
Automation
Home automation applications combine remote security with remote control.
Basically, you can monitor your home from wherever you are - on the road, on
holiday, or at the office. If your burglar alarm goes off, not only do you get
alerted, but you get to go live and see who are perpetrators are and perhaps
even lock them in. Not only can you see things at home, but you can do things
too. You can program your video, switch your oven on so that the preheating is
complete by the time you arrive home (traffic jams permitting) and so on. Your
GPRS capable mobile phone really does become like the remote control devices we
use today for our television, video, hi-fi and so on. As the Internet Protocol
(IP) will soon be everywhere - not just in mobile phones because of GPRS but all
manner of household appliances and in every machine - these devices can be
addressed and instructed. A key enabler for home automation applications will be
Bluetooth, which allows disparate devices to interwork.