Until now John Gillooly thought 3G was some sort of rap artist.
ABOVE: Using data on the SIM card a phone talks to the base station and verifies with the HLR (Home Location Register), which keep billing information, before the call is connected.
All the tech companies are talking convergence. The buzz of the 21st century is putting everything in the one device. We are seeing it with the advent of the media centre concept with PCs, with the rise of the iPod style portable hard drive MP3 players, but nowhere is this trend happening quicker than in the realm of the mobile phone.
Talk to the people in the know and you'll find they don't call handsets mobile phones, or even handsets for that matter. They are called terminals, portable access points to the global data networks.
It is a trend following the exponential technology curve that has us so excited about new generations of products every six months, and now that persistent issues like international standardisation are finally being dealt with, mobile phones are becoming damn cool pioneers of computing technology.
ABOVE: GPRS introduces two new segments to the mobile switching centre, the SGSN and GGSN, which control the flow of packets to and from the phone, while talking to the HLR.
For all of the immense wank factor associated with the marketing of next generation mobiles, there is some stunning technology being produced and rapid shifts of traditional marketplaces. Nokia currently makes 2 out of every 5 mobile phones sold worldwide, but more interestingly it recently became the largest supplier of digital cameras in the world.
Phone cameras have a long way to come before they destroy the markets of Kodak and the like, but it will undoubtedly happen. Traditional camera manufacturers are so worried that they are beginning to form partnerships with phone manufacturers. Otherwise the money making part of the market they have so carefully nurtured, the average consumers, could be lost to the Nokias, Sony Ericssons and Samsungs of the world.
But cameras are a tiny part of the picture, being hyped as the bait to get people upgrading their terminals. What is really cool receives much less attention, the background goings on that make it so easy to stream live footage of your butt to randomly chosen strangers.
ABOVE: GPRS and GSM are both enhancements to existing GSM technology. A hardware upgrade will be required to make the move to WCDMA 3G functionality.
Tackling the issue of next generation mobile phones is like trying to eat a phenomenally large hamburger; most time is spent rotating the thing trying to work out where to make the first incision. It is a big bundle of interrelated technologies, with major action happening with the networks, terminal hardware and software.
Europe finally gets it rightAustralians are pretty lucky when it comes to mobile telephony. For some reason - that few people can agree on - we have leapt onto the concept with gay abandon. Not only do we tether ourselves to constant voice communication, we use SMS like few other countries have so far.
We are comfortable with the concept and have benefited from being seen as a major market for the big players like Nokia. This is perhaps a side effect of the fact that the United States is a mess when it comes to networks. There are ridiculous numbers of competing standards, and historically poor support for the one standard that has revolutionised mobile telephony in Europe and Australia, its full name is Global System for Mobile Communications (or as the Frenchies call it Groupe Speciale Mobile), but we all know and love it as GSM.
If there is any good entry point to the future of mobile communications it is with GSM. This standard evolved as Europe began looking for a digital phone system as demand began to bite into the existing first generation analog networks. Sensing the need to avoid such future problems with wholesale network replacement, several European countries banded together to form the Group Speciale Mobile. This was endorsed by the European commission in 1984 and notably backed by the United Kingdom, West Germany, France and Italy. In 1987 the GSM standard was decided upon, a standard that still forms the basis for the networks we use to today with over two thirds of worldwide phone users connecting via GSM.
And that is the beauty of it. As we move towards the magical 3G technology that has had everyone excited for way too long now, the networks will evolve rather than be subject to wholesale replacement. There are clear paths defined, luckily for us all building upon the solid framework built by GSM.
Ultimately the implementation of 3G will come in the form of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications system (UMTS), which has the noble aim of becoming a worldwide standard for both data access and network interoperability. The term is used almost interchangeably with W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), which is the radio technology underlying 3G.
What is happening in the United States and Japan is much different, but shooting to a similar endpoint of 3G functionality. Japan already has a well established 3G network run by NTT DoCoMo, with over half a million subscribers, while the yanks have to cope with evolving GSM, cdma and PCS networks.
Radio free nowhereOnce you take away the colour screens and skull drilling ringtones, the single most important thing to know about a mobile phone or other terminal is that it is a radio transceiver. Not only does the radio mean we need to switch our phones off on planes, without it we would be unable to SMS those delightfully (*)(*) ridden ASCII jokes to our mates.
GSM operates on one of three radio frequencies, all heavily regulated unlike the 'free' 2.4GHz band used for Bluetooth and WiFi. Most of the world uses either the 900MHz or 1800MHz bands, while yet again those non-conformist North Americans use the 1900MHz band. UMTS utilises frequencies in the 1885-2025MHz band.
Within the realm of each telco there will be a certain number of available channels to use, which get split between voice and data channels and segmented across the city in a honeycomb pattern of cells, which are centred on base stations. As your terminal passes from one cell to another it gets handed over to the new base station, switching seamlessly to a new frequency.
As you can see from the diagram, the channels can then be reused in non-adjacent cells to maximise available channels, and the cells themselves are packed dense
Issue: 137 | June, 2012