Third generation wireless has always suffered from a sort of multiple personality disorder. The problem stems from the way Europeans (and much of the world) fell in love years ago with GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) cellular technology, while the US (i.e. Qualcomm) long-touted the wonders of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) wireless service. Naturally, the Europeans wanted to base 3G on GSM, while the US wanted to use a descendant of cdmaOne?.
3G was to be the grand reconciliation between the two camps: a GSM system with a CDMA air interface (among other things). Problem was, there were too many CDMA descendants out there. ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) and the Japanese network operator NTT DoCoMo wanted Ericsson's W-CDMA (Wideband CDMA) to serve as the basis for 3G, while Qualcomm and the Korean carriers demanded backward compatibility and discovered they could simply aggregate existing codes and channels to achieve the same operating parameters as Ericsson's W-CDMA. This led the CDMA buffs to develop a slew of "new and improved" forms of CDMA resulting in the various flavors of cdma2000? (cdma2000? 1XRTT and its two descendants, cdma2000? 1xEV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) and cdma2000? 1xEVDV)- any and all of these have been pitched as a candidate for an official 3G system.
Indeed, Vivo, the largest mobile operator in South America, recently announced Brazil's first CDMA2000 1xEV-DO service. It's supported by Motorola's Brazilian subsidiary, which provided the network hardware, software, and deployment services. By upgrading the existing Motorola BTS (Base Transceiver Subsystems) along with a new Multi-Channel CDMA Module, cdma2000? 1xEV-DO service was enabled on the network, which now allows subscribers' mobile devices to handle peak data rates of up to 2.4 Mbps. This in turn allows access to real-time services and super-fast versions of such traditional applications as email, web surfing, music and file downloading, video and audio streaming. Moreover, aside from mobile 3G broadband capability, VIVO has also incorporated some of Motorola's signature solutions, including Push-To-Talk over Cellular. VIVO has also made a large purchase of Motorola SoftSwitches. Much of the rest of the world has followed the W-CDMA air interface for 3G in the quest for a globally-roamable system that supports fast mobile, slow mobile/local mobile, and fixed applications, for both voice and data.
In 1998, European and Japanese standards bodies created the 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Program) a standards group that developed the common, global 3G wireless standard now called UMTS (Universal Mobile Telephone Standard). For CDMA aficionados in the US, a separate 3GPP-2 (Third Generation Partnership Project Number 2) was founded.
The long-time goal of 3G networks is to be able to transmit wireless data at 144 Kbps at mobile user speeds, 384 Kbps at pedestrian user speeds and an impressive 2 Mbps in fixed locations (home and office). The latest version of UMTS (Release 6) allows for a high-bandwidth radio uplink to complement the HSDPA (High-bandwidth Downlink Packet Access) that was defined in Release 5. Combined, these technologies permit high speed symmetrical data communications, supporting multimedia, VoIP and other IP communications. HSDPA has a theoretical data rate of 14.4 Mbps. In the utopian future, you'll be able to roam around the world using an UMTS compliant 3G phone or a W-CDMA, EDGE (Enhanced Data-rates for GSM Evolution) or cdma2000? phone.
Operators worldwide are now beginning to offer 3G services. In last month's issue of VON Magazine, we examined a trial 3G video call center established in Portugal by mobile network operator Vodafone, based on ingenious technology by the Portuguese startup Collab (www.collab.pt). Vodafone's "Vodafone Live! with 3G" service recently rocketed into the UK, along with the release of 10 new 3G phones, such as the Nokia 6630, the Sony Ericsson V800, and the Sharp 902 (Europe's first 2 megapixel camera phone equipped with both an optical zoom and autofocus). These and other phones, such as the LG u8150 and the Sony Ericsson Z1010, are now coming into use as all of the giant European network operators, such as O2, Orange, and T-Mobile UK, start to deploy 3G services, mostly in urban areas.
US network operators find 3G intriguing, partly because of its facility with multimedia.
Companies such as RADVISION (www.radvision.com) are already working with protocols that help deliver multimedia services over networks of variable quality. One such protocol is H.324/ M, the W-CDMA version of which is 3G-324M. RADVISION's 3G-324M toolkit v3.0 enables handset and equipment
developers to build 3G devices and platforms that also support the WNSRP proposed standard for rapid video call setup times.
RADVISION has ported its 3G-324M and SIP developer solutions to run with such operating systems as Windows CE, Symbian and Embedded Linux and multimedia chipsets from Intel, TI and Qualcomm. (ASUSTeK is using the Windows CE version of the RADVISION 3G-324M Toolkit to develop a complete reference design for its new line of 3G Smartphones running Windows CE). The 3G-324M toolkit is part of RADVISION's 3G developer solution suite for creating and testing voice, video, and data collaboration services for mobile or fixed broadband systems.
At the recent GSM World Congress in France, RADVISION demonstrated a new form of its 3G video services solution that enables communication between 3G video handsets and PCs running Microsoft's Istanbul client. This integration allows for the merger of Presence, Instant Messaging (IM), desktop voice/video/ data and real time 3G video telephony into a single, seamless communications architecture.
IMS Homogenizes
But network operators are just as interested in IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), the 3G service architecture that could serve as a common underlying service architecture for both wireline as well as wireless networks. IMS was formulated with mobility in mind, but mobility no longer implies wireless technology solely. After all, some people take their softphone-equipped laptops and move from one office to another, or fly out to California, then plug into the local network and expect to once again have access to their services. Under such circumstances, having a common service architecture such as IMS becomes very important.
IP will one day be more of an enabler of extremely sophisticated multimedia and converged services where different types of communications will interwork in ways never before possible. In such service scenarios where IP and VoIP really show their respective strengths, you need a more encompassing, standards-based service architecture that allows operators to more easily integrate everything. IMS seems to fill the bill. It will supply network operators with the means to take their networks to higher levels of functionality.
Too Much, Too Soon?
Network operators rely on new and exciting services to differentiate themselves from the competition, reduce churn and generate lots of revenue. To this end, more than 80 Tier-1 and Tier-2 have turned to the Adamind Spire Platform from Adamind (www.adamind.com), a spin-out from Philips Electronics and Emblaze. The platform features realtime, high volume transcoding of graphics, audio and video, and it can be used to help operators deliver messaging, content services and value added services.
Over at HeyAnita (www.heyanita.com), Mark Willingham, VP of marketing, says, "Our focus is on developing enhanced messaging solutions, which we define as, literally, those solutions that may exist today that can be further enhanced when adapted to a highly mobile world where people will have many mobile devices, since they will spend more and more time being mobile." HeyAnita has national deployments in the US with major carriers such as Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless. Their footprint has been growing over the world and extends through Europe, since that's the hotbed for the mobile industry.
Willingham has some harsh words for his competitors: "The mobile telecom industry has hopes and aspirations. Billions of dollars in revenues are driving this industry forward, yet the end user gets lost in the shuffle; he's become a sort of guinea pig or testing ground for a lot of solutions that most people will say in hindsight were developed and deployed too quickly, before it was determined how useful they were."
"I don't think anyone would look upon a 40% success as acceptable, yet when people try to send a picture from one camera phone to another, a 40% success rate is probably what they'll encounter," says Wallingham. "That's because of such things as incompatibility of devices, and interoperability issues across networks. End users expect a call to work correctly 99.999% of the time, and in Europe text messages get through at that success rate. So, when a mobile phone or any device doesn't work well, all we end up with is frustration."
HeyAnita's solution to interoperability failure for operators is RMS (Rapid Message Service).
"RMS allows a mobile or other telephony user to send messages that emulate texting, just by talking," says Wallingham. "If I initiate an RMS on my mobile device and I address it to you, you'll hear a beep on your phone and the display will read 'Mark Willingham has sent you an RMS.' You then click a button on the phone and listen to your message. It's not text-to-speech, it's a sort of email for voice. Sometimes we want to communicate with someone, but we don't want to actually have a live conversation with them, and we don't care whether we use text or voice. We also want this alternate process to be available to us everywhere. It's not like calling direct to voice mail, because most people can only avail themselves of that feature if they're on the same network as the called party, and on the same voicemail system."
"Our RMS, however, doesn't even require a handset client-the technology resides with the network operator-and you can send an RMS to anyone today and they'll receive it on their phone," says Wallingham. "After the called party listens to the message, they're given the option to press '1' to reply, whereupon the calling party's phone will get back an RMS message notification. If you're in a meeting, you can just look down, see it and decide to listen to it later. Or you can listen to it then and there. It allows for a thread of communication to go back and forth without intruding on that person's day, without ringing their phone and without the person calling being forced into a live conversation."
Tatara Systems (www.tatarasystems.com) also takes a "behind the scenes" approach with their products. Their Mobile Services Control Platform enables a branded provider to deliver value added services to mobile broadband service subscribers, regardless of what network connection the subscriber is currently using.
John Morgan, VP of product marketing for Tatara Systems says, "In a nutshell, our system enables a service provider to offer converged mobile services across multiple technologies, without requiring the provider to own all of the networks. A perfect example is Vodafone which wants to offer their Mobile Connect service, a combination of 3G and WiFi. With our system they don't have to own the whole WiFi network. To the customer it appears to be a single, seamless service. Our systems will work whether the network is WiMAX, WiFi, or 3G, even if the service provider doesn't own it."
"Our products have two aspects," says Morgan. "First, if you normally check your email on your laptop via WiFi at the airport, and one day you're at a train station without WiFi, the email will travel over the 3G network; you're automatically switching over to the best available network that you've subscribed to. Second, say you usually get your SMSs [Short Messaging Service messages] over your cell phone at home, but now, because your coverage at home is terrible, you want to divert them over a WiFi network to your laptop. Our technology can do that."
In October 2004, Xten (www.xten.com) a provider of VoIP and Video over IP SIP softphones, demonstrated new IM and Presence features of their eye- Beam SIP softphone in conjunction with
Xten's SIP-based eyeBeam softphone has been tested in a 3G environment.
Vonage service on a 3G UMTS network.
Xten's CTO, Robert Sparks, says: "What's exciting is our integration of the simple protocols for Presence, IM and application configuration. In particular, XCAP [XML Configuration Access Protocol] deals with things like storing a buddy list on a server. In the 3G world there's a Presence extension called the Event List Extension that allows someone who's terminal on a 3G network-or any other network that uses the Extension-to issue one 'subscribe event' to their buddy list. So, instead of subscribing to everyone on their buddy list one at a time, they put out one subscription and they get back a notification that tells them who the server knows is on their buddy list right now, along with the Presence information of each of those people currently online."
Chinese Checkers
3G's greatest competition may ultimately come from the yet-to-be rati- fied mobile version of WiMAX (see the WiMax article elsewhere in this issue). Moreover, Korea's ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) has a WiMAX competitor called WiBro (In the 2.3 GHz band) and NTT DoCoMo has founded a "Super 3G" consortium, perhaps to counter interest in WiMAX. Finally, the Chinese have their own 2 Mbps 3G system, called TD-SCDMA (Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access).
Richard Grigonis is Editor-in-Chief of VON Magazine.
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