It gets kinda complicated, but basically:
Japan:
current cellphone system is PDC (2G digital circuit switched)
I-mode is PDC-P (2.5G digital packet switched)
There's also PHS and cdmaOne
3G will be WCDMA
Europe:
current cellphone system is GPS (circuit switched)
Now building GPRS network (2.5G digital packet switched)
3G will be UMTS
Lacking an electrical engineering degree, the easiest way to think
about it is:
circuit switched means you have to make a phone call and stay
connected to transmit data (so you pay by time)
packet switched means it's more like the internet (you pay by data
use)
Digital is, well, digital, as opposed to analog (1G cell phones)
2G is the current state of (most of the developed planet)
2.5G is basically a more data-centered network (which usually mean
digital packet switched)
3G is all the hype --megs/sec to the phone, streaming video,
etc...basically 3G is the IMT-2000 standard, which itself has myirad
implementations; wCDMA, CDMA2000, UMTS...
There's also several "internim" or "alternate" technologies out there,
including EDGE, cdmaOne...
Theoretically all roads lead to 3G...but as usual Japan will be the
first to commercially implement.
r e n
Andrea Hoffmann wrote:
> Giles,
>
> > Hi - yeah, this merging of was exactly the thrust of
> > the presentation by a biz dev manager from IDO yesterday
> > at Interop.
>
> wow, here we go! I just read on the net that in Europe
> (especially Germany) they plan to introduce xhtml
> compatible wireless handsets as soon as summer of the
> year (!) and expect xhtml to become the sucessor of wml
> at least when UMTS (can somebody explain that buzzword
> to me in some simple words?) gets introduced.
>
> Did the IDO manager say anything about timelines and dates?
>
> Andrea
--
ascii: r e n f i e l d
octal: \162 \145 \156 \146 \151 \145 \154 \144
hex: \x72 \x65 \x6e \x66 \x69 \x65 \x6c \x64
** note new work email: renfield.kuroda@msdw.com **
Received on Fri Jun 9 02:56:02 2000