[IP] 3G, American Style
3G, American Style
Broadband cell-phone services begin to roll out in the U.S., but face
a standards mess—as well as competition from Wi-Fi and other wireless
technologies.
By Eric S. Brown
September 22, 2004
<http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/09/wo_brown092204.asp?
trk=nl>
September was a big month for so-called third generation, or 3G,
broadband wireless services, which are intended to replace standard
cellular networks over the next few years. Until recently, most of the
3G action occurred in Japan and Europe, but now the technology is
appearing stateside. Earlier this month, AT&T Wireless introduced 3G
service in Dallas and San Diego, following the company's July rollouts
in Detroit, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Seattle. Verizon Wireless had
already introduced a service in San Diego (along with one in
Washington, DC), making the California city one of the first markets in
the world to see head-to-head 3G competition. Sprint, meanwhile, is
expected to debut 3G later this year, and Cingular (which is hoping to
soon merge with AT&T Wireless) is preparing its own launch. And last
week the keepers of the spectrum at the Federal Communications
Commission announced plans to allocate an additional 20 megahertz for
3G services, bringing the U.S. total to a still-limited, but not so
cramped, 110 megahertz.
Has 3G finally turned the corner from hype, confusion, and high cost?
Not quite. For starters, the AT&T and Verizon services are based on
incompatible standards, and the Verizon service is currently available
only for laptops. Even overseas, commercial deployments are rolling out
much more slowly than anticipated. Unless the networks arrive more
quickly, offering services and prices that consumers find appealing,
the impact of 3G could be blunted by a variety of competing
technologies that can provide broadband wireless connections. Already
there is some pressure from Wi-Fi, and in particular, mesh networks
that link Wi-Fi networks into larger service areas. In addition, major
cellular carriers are testing out a 3G alternative called Flash-OFDM.
And on the horizon is a potentially faster broadband wireless
technology known as WiMax.
But first, let’s give credit where credit is due: Unlike earlier “2.5G”
services, which rarely broke the 100-kilobit-per-second barrier, the
new 3G sofferings are recognizably broadband. AT&T's service promises
220- to 320-kilobit-per-second Web access, with burst rates of up to
384 kilobits per second. The service is surprisingly inexpensive at $25
a month, but it’s available only over $300 3G phones such as the
Motorola A845 or Nokia 6651 or on laptops equipped with a $150 add-in
card. Verizon's pricier service ($80 per month) offers 300 to 500
kilobits per second, but it’s available only for laptops. These 3G
services establish network platforms that are far more flexible in
supporting new types of services (such as streaming video or
push-to-talk) and they also provide vendors with more spectrum to
relieve overtaxed cellular networks.
The problem with this picture is that the technology is expensive and
the standards are still in flux. AT&T's service is based on UMTS
(Universal Mobile Telecommunications System), an “umbrella” 3G standard
prevalent in Europe that was intended to unify the warring factions of
the cellular world. In fact, however, it did not. (If you're squeamish
about acronyms, skip the next paragraph, but the take-home message is:
What a mess!)
UMTS was meant to blend GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications),
the cellular standard that represents about 70 percent of the world’s
cell phone users, with CDMA (code division multiple access), which
claims about 20 percent of users, mainly in the Americas. Yet two other
related, but incompatible variations of CDMA have also survived: the
CDMA-2000/Evolution Data Optimized (EV-DO) service being pushed by
Verizon and Sprint in the United States, and the Wideband-CDMA based
FOMA (Freedom of Multimedia Access) that NTT DoCoMo is selling in
Japan. The latter boasts the largest number of 3G subscribers in the
world.
There, that was easy, wasn’t it? Unless of course you want a phone that
supports more than one of these standards, in which case you’re out of
luck. Cell phone vendors are still struggling to reduce the cost of
supporting both a 3G and a 2G service in a single phone, let alone
supporting two different 3G services. Then there’s the added problem of
revenue generation—gaining subscribers beyond the usual traveling
salespeople.
Those applications will eventually emerge, from wireless gaming
services to upcoming MP3 music-playing phones. But by the time they
arrive, other wireless competition will have arrived along with them.
The most pressing competition for 3G comes from Wi-Fi, the wireless
networks that are popping up in urban locations around the world. Later
this year, Motorola and other companies will start shipping cell phones
that include Wi-Fi access both for data and for voice-over-IP
telephony. A few days ago in this space, Deborah Asbrand reported on
mesh networks being deployed by city governments in Philadelphia and
elsewhere that knit together multiple Wi-Fi networks to cover a large
urban area. Asbrand wisely suggests that this is not a feasible
investment for cities; yet warnings over fiscal responsibility haven’t
stopped dozens of cities from investing millions in money-losing
convention centers, ballparks, and tourist traps. Why should they balk
at relatively cheap Wi-Fi networks? The mesh networks are coming,
whether installed in an organized fashion by cities and broadband
providers, or piecemeal by businesses and individuals. And they’ll
cover the majority of places where people want to go online.
True, Wi-Fi is not likely to spread very far beyond urban cores anytime
soon, but here is where a Wi-Fi related technology called WiMax might
play a big role. WiMax is the latest and by far the most widely
endorsed standard for “fixed” wireless broadband services, which use
microwave towers to beam data to and from to homes and businesses
equipped with the appropriate antennas. WiMax boasts transmission
speeds of up to 15 megabits per second with a range of up to one mile.
Although still probably several years away from commercial
feasibility, WiMax has gained backing from heavyweights such as Intel
and Nortel; Intel expects to ship WiMax chipsets by next year. WiMax
has also received support from U.S. politicians, who see the technology
as the answer for upgrading broadband access for rural areas. Last
week, the WiMax Forum—an alliance of organizations that is promoting
the standard—received a boost when networking communications equipment
giant Cisco Systems joined the 140-member group.
What does WiMax have to do with 3G? First, some cellular carriers are
hoping to use 3G to compete with digital subscriber line and
cable-modem providers in suburban areas, and to serve small-town users
beyond the reach of DSL and cable. WiMax addresses the same market.
Second, a mobile version of WiMax is only a few years away.
Another truly mobile technology that is closely related to 3G is even
closer to commercial use. Flash-OFDM is a spread spectrum technology
developed by Flarion Technologies that uses a scheme called orthogonal
frequency division multiplexing to improve performance by continually
seeking out the cleanest possible transmission frequencies, allowing
multiple signals to travel over a single path without interfering with
each other. That, together with its all-IP architecture, enables it
to handle 1-3 megabits per second-roughly 2 to 10 times the speed of
today’s 3G networks. Nextel offers Flash-OFDM service in the Research
Triangle area near Raleigh, NC; in addition, Telstra, T-Mobile, and
Vodafone are field-testing the technology. Although Flash-OFDM can use
the same frequencies and base station equipment as existing 3G
networks, current regulations prohibit its use over those networks.
Meanwhile, 3G technology companies promise that enhancements coming in
a few years will significantly boost performance. If so, they had
better arrive quickly. And these companies had better hope that the
need for ubiquitous data access outweighs the ubiquitous need for
speed.
Eric S. Brown is a technology writer in Boston.
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