3G Network Coming to America

Not2Bryt64 writes: "Reuters has a story about Cingular building a nationwide 3G network. According to Cingular it 'will deliver mobile users data at rates of up to 470,000 bits a second -- fast enough to watch video clips over phones.'" I just hope it doesn't mean that we have to see more annoying Cingular commercials. But I want my video cell phone!

Is that bandwidth per user?

[color of static]

Most of these wireless solutions bandy about large bandwidth numbers, but never give break downs of actual usage scenarios. I imagine that this is the bandwidth in a cell or for optimal loading scenarios. If so, then I can see only getting old modem speeds in the average cell in a metropolitian area.

Shared bandwidth maybe effecient for the carrier, but it can really bite for the user.

Costs

[osiris]

I dunno about the states, but here in the UK 3g mobile networks have basically hurt the phone companies really bad financially. The government put up the 3g licenses for auction and the top 4 mobile companies paid something like a combined 60billion ukp for them. And that doesnt include actually building the network.

Plus, some pundits have already slated it as doomed as the current networks are already vastly popular with relatively cheap phones. It would have to take a big incentive for most people to get rid of their cheap gsm phones and move to 3g ones. Because chances are, they are gonna be expensive so the phone companies can actually try to break even. Its gonna take em a long time though...

However, considering that the states isnt all gsm already, i hope your 3g network gets sorted properly.

Oh No You Can't

[Tim Ward]

You get the high bandwidth quoted only when stationary next to a base station. If you're driving the bit rate drops to well below anything you'd want to use to watch video.

It is not _that_kind_ of 3G

[chess]

It is only GSM V.3, being based on TDMA.
It is done via channel bundeling and new protocoll for airinterface.

3G is WCDMA (here in Europe) or some other stuff (ask Qualcomm).

cees

Cingular and the Treo

[JoeGrind]

From what I've read so far, Cingular is one of the cellular service providers who will be offering the Handspring Treo [handspring.com]. An integrated pda, cell phone, messaging system, and all around wireless device plus more bandwidth can't possibly be a bad thing. Hope it works out.

Re:Let's hope they use the same 3G standards ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, most of North America will probably go with IS2000 (a 3G standard), which is backwards compatible with IS95 (current 2G CDMA).

Most of Europe will probably go with UMTS, which isn't compatible with anything (uses similar frequency allocations of GSM, but a GSM phone won't work on a UMTS network).

An exception to this will be AT&T, which is likely going with UMTS in North America.

UMTS and IS2000 are (as far as I know) completely incompatible (although both are CDMA, TDMA is dying).

Meanwhile...

[Misfit]

Sprint PCS is expected to have 3G in June.

on a side note. For those of you compaining about the video on phone. It seemed to me that they weren't pushing video on phone, but that they were trying to give people an idea of how fast the throughput is. Not everyone understands what a KB is.

Misfit

Re:Meanwhile...

[oldave]

Additionally, Sprint PCS will be using their 3G network (CDMA2000) to implement the direct-connect type thing that Nextel does... where you'll be able to use your phone as a walkie-talkie (2-way radio).

They're claiming 144kb/sec data as well (for the first phase of the rollout).

No word yet on what pricing will be, for either data or the direct-connect feature.

I think both these features will be somewhat slow to catch on - people will have to buy new phones to get the advantage... unless Sanyo, for example, actually does what they've promised and provide firmware upgrades to the 4700 and newer models (I just bought a 4700, not for 3G, but because after 3 years, it was time to ditch the old Samsung 1500 with the broken antenna and battery that wouldn't hold a charge anymore).

Re:It is not _that_kind_ of 3G

[stinkyj]

3G is UMTS

this is more like 2.5.

GPRS/EDGE is a way to bridge the gap between 2G and 3G. Using this tiered approach, providers can save money by not having to completely update their equipment at once to go 3G.

Sure it's fast, but is it *fast*?

[Xunker]

I had the chance to use the other US 3G provider, VoiceStream, a few weeks ago for a few days. While the connection was a decent speed (fluctuated from 3kBps up to ~12), what killed my hope for it was the latency. Doing anything directly interactive, namely telnet/rlogin/ssh, was highly painful. I can't in good concience solely blame 3G because voicesteams' equipment could just be shite, but I don't think it would be bad enough to give me ~2 second latencies.

big difference is population density

[Proud Geek]

The overhead for operating a mobile network here is much higher because you need a lot more towers to reach the same number of people. That extra cost prohibits attractive pricing of most of the handheld mobile devices.

Re:who cares about video cell phones?

[Smitty825]

The one thing that 3G is going to do for me is FINALLY provide a decent wireless service for my PDA that i can pay for along with my cell phone.

Heh, I'm sure with the wonderful [verizonwireless.com] providers [att.com] that exist in the United States, you will probably have the luxary of paying for the added services on a "per-byte" basis...

This is not 3G - as in UMTS or CDMA-2000 It's 2.5G

[Zarhan]

This is GPRS/EDGE-network, delivered by Nokia [nokia.com], and only 3G in an american sense. Cingular is moving from old TDMA system to GSM-based technology simply because they want to enable GPRS/EDGE (packet data) services. In theory, this could be done with TDMA as well, but there is no hardware available from any vendors.

As for the bit rates, 470kbps is reachable...in a test lab. In GPRS, depending on the encoding (CS-1 to CS-4) you get 10 to 20kbps per timeslot. Note, that this is the rate on PHYSICAL layer. You lose a slice for all the overhead caused by the protocol stack, of course.
One TRX (tranmitter/receiver) means 8 timeslots on a 200 kHz band. The newest GPRS phones are "4+1"-devices, using 4 timeslots for downlink, 1 for uplink, with CS-2 encoding, yielding about 40 kbps bitrate - in optimal conditions. This means that there are no other users and you get those timeslots completely for your own use.
EDGE brings in a new modulation (8-PSK instead of GMSK), in which the bitrate is tripled (symbol rate/baud rate stays the same).

So, in optimal conditions, with CS-4 encoding and EDGE, you get about 80 kbps. This means that for 470kbps you need 6 timeslots. Right. That means almost one whole TRX for a single user.
Either Cingular invests a LOT of money (well, since they are switching their entire infrastructure to a new system, they are doing that already), and brings in one TRX/user, those rates are unreachable in any real world environment.

Of course, EDGE is not ready yet, and in GPRS only CS-1 and CS-2 encodings are implemented anywhere (CS-3 and CS-4 coming in on H1 of 2002), so the maximum bitrate at the moment is about 40kbps.