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The year of living wirelesslyApril 2004
As the standard history from the Internet
Society notes, the "key underlying technical idea"
of the Internet was open architecture networking -
the ability to link together completely different
networking technologies provided they followed the
appropriate protocols. The idea arose in the early
days of networking research out of the need to
find a way to allow packet radio links to
interoperate with conventional landline
connections, and eventually led to the drawing up
of the fundamental TCP/IP that underpins the
Internet.
The theoretical ability to access the Internet via
radio links may go back to the Net's origins, but
in practical terms progress since then has been
slow. The two main second- generation (2G)
wireless air interfaces - the way the information
is encoded as a radio signal - employed by mobile
phones, CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and
GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), are
hamstrung by very limited data transmission
speeds.
Although CDMA dominates the US market, globally it
is dwarfed by GSM. According to the CDMA
Development Group, at the end of last year, there
were around 200 million users of its technology;
this contrasts with one billion GSM customers at
the beginning of this year (see an excellent white
paper for details).
The poor data transfer speeds of 2G technologies -
typically around 10 kilobits per second - render
them unsuitable for Internet activities except
perhaps the occasional email. This has led to
various extensions to the main radio standards,
sometimes known as 2.5G technologies. For GSM
there is GPRS (General Packet Radio Service),
which offers ten times the speed of basic GSM,
while an extension to CDMA called CDMA 2000 1X
claims even better results. The GSM world's answer
to CDMA 2000 1X is known as EDGE (Enhance d Data
for Global Evolution), which also offers higher
throughput than GPRS.
Beyond these lie the third-generation (3G) systems
that aim to provide true broadband speeds -
several Megabits per second - to mobile devices:
Wideband-CDMA (W-CDMA) from the GSM manufacturers
(also known as UMTS), and CDMA 2000 1xEV from the
CDMA side.
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