Digitalwall: 3G Time Comes (1) What Is 3G?

3G will infiltrate at a speed much faster than you have ever expected.

Lured by previous overoptimistic expectations, European mobile operators offer too high bids for their 3G licenses, which ends up to be a heavy financial burden. One after another, these operators announce to hold off 3G investments.

In spite of negative press coverage, 3G will be a reality in Taiwan pretty soon - within this year. Currently, five mobile operators have obtained their licenses and nailed down their equipment suppliers, some even pledged to introduce services within this year.

What on earth is 3G? Even the mobile operators with 3G licenses in hand do not have a clear answer, not to mention general consumers.

In technical terms, 3G is mainly known for its ability to provide a larger bandwidth and a packet billing model. The bandwidth of 2G currently in use is about 9.6K bps, which is sufficient for the transmission of voice data (phone calls). Yet for services that require more bandwidth resources, that is not enough.

One example is the mobile Internet. Accessing the Internet with a mobile phone would require large bandwidths. As small as 9.6K, the bandwidth of the WAP mobile Internet service introduced by some of 2G operators is sufficient for black-and-white handsets. However, as most handsets will have color screens in the future and multi-color data files have larger sizes, larger bandwidths will be necessary.

Another example is the video phone, which is regarded as one of the basic functions of 3G. Larger bandwidths will be required for the simultaneous transmission of voice and video data, just as a 56K modem is sufficient to enable listening to the online radio but a faster ADSL connection is necessary for watching movies online.

During the course of both a video call and a conventional call, the handset is in a circuit switch mode, and the call is charged by the length of call time (as per second, or as per minute). That is the billing model familiar to most consumers and there's no need to provide further education.

Yet for the mobile Internet, the handset is in a packet switch mode, and the service is billed by data packets. For example, if a consumer uses his/her handset to download a 1KB pop song, which is equal to 8 packets. If each of those packets is charges at NTD 0.025, he/she will have to pay NTD 0.2.

One of the advantages of the packet billing model is its ability to charge in accordance with the actual volume of transmitted data. In other words, consumers who have not been involved in any data transmission will not be charged, even if they are connected to the Internet. As this is a billing model unfamiliar to many consumers, proper education would be necessary. It is a model used by the GPRS Internet access, which is known as a 2.5G service.

MMS (Multimedia Message Service) is the most promising service to mobile communication operators. The service, which was originally intended for 3G, is now incorporated into GPRS and regarded as a golden goose to operators.

Through the packet switch mode, consumers can transmit texts, graphics, music and other MMS messages to others, which are more attractive than the current SMS, which is in the text format only. With the extreme popularity of SMS today, it is not surprising that operators have betted so much on the next generation MMS.

I hope that experts will not be bored by the above general introduction, nor general consumers be scared away by the technical terms. In my follow-on articles, I will point out the keys to the development of 3G. In that context, a general introduction to the background is necessary.

Is 3G a bubble? I can assure you that it is definitely not. It will change your life in five years, just as the Internet did: you might not be able to use email some five years ago, now you cannot live without it.

Ironically, the success of 3G would have nothing to do with the Internet, or at least have nothing to do with the mobile Internet. That is opposite to the expectation of most people. In my next article, I will explain why the largest application of 3G is not the mobile Internet. (
2003/03/09 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )