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Cellphones, Wireless
It's hard to believe nowadays, but in a simpler time, cellphones really were called "cell phones," not dumbphones, smartphones, feature phones, or superphones. They bulged in your pocket -- if they fit in your pocket at all, that is -- and they made calls. That's it. None of this social networking, messaging, browsing, Instagramming, Flash 10.1 nonsense. They didn't upload 5 megapixel photos to Flickr, and they most certainly didn't turn into wireless hotspots. Of course, those bleak days are mercifully behind us now -- but as carriers around the world start to light up a promising new generation of high-speed wireless networks, things are beginning to get a little confusing. Just what is "4G," anyway? It's one higher than 3G, sure, but does that necessarily mean it's better? Why are all four national carriers in the US suddenly calling their networks 4G? Is it all the same thing? Answering those questions requires that we take a take a little walk through wireless past, present, and future... but we think it's a walk you'll enjoy. First things first: "G" stands for "generation," so when you hear someone refer to a "4G network," that means they're talking about a wireless network based on fourth-generation technology. And actually, it's the definition of a "generation" in this context that has us in this whole pickle in the first place; it's the reason why there's so much confusion. But more on that in a bit -- first, let's take a trip down memory lane into the primordial ooze that gave rise to the first generation way back in the day.
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1G
Our journey begins in the early 1980s with the introduction of several groundbreaking network technologies: AMPS in the US and a combination of TACS and NMT in Europe. The meanings of those acronyms are unimportant -- there won't be a quiz later. All you really need to know is that unlike earlier systems, these new standards were given enough spectrum for reasonably heavy use by subscribers, were fully automated on the carrier's end without requiring any human operator intervention, and used electronics that could be miniaturized enough to fit into smallish packages (think Motorola DynaTAC -- early prototype pictured right). Though there were several generations of mobile telephone services before these that date all the way back to the 1950s, the trifecta of AMPS, TACS, and NMT is commonly considered to be the first
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generation -- "1G," if you will -- because they made cellphones practical to the masses for the very first time. They were robust, reliable, and would eventually come to blanket the entirety of many industrialized nations around the world. Thing is, no one was thinking about data services in the 1G days; these were purely analog systems that were conceived and designed for voice calls and very little else. Modems existed that could communicate over these networks -- some handsets even had them built-in -- but because analog cellular connections were susceptible to far more noise than conventional landlines, transfer speeds were ridiculously slow. And even if they'd been fast, it wouldn't have really mattered; per-minute rates on AMPS networks in the 80s made cellphones luxuries and Wall Street powerbroker business necessities, not must-haves for the everyman. Besides, the technology didn't exist for an awesome smartphone that could consume that much data anyhow. Oh, and YouTube had yet to be invented. The stars simply hadn't yet aligned.
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2G
The early nineties saw the rise of the first digital cellular networks, which had a number of obvious benefits over the analog networks they were supplanting: improved sound quality, better security, and higher total capacity, just to name a few biggies. GSM got off to an early start in Europe, while D-AMPS and an early version of Qualcomm's CDMA known as IS-95 took hold in the US. (You might remember D-AMPS better as "TDMA," though that's technically not descriptive enough -- GSM also employs the TDMA multiplexing scheme, even though the two standards are incompatible.) No one disputes that these systems collectively represented the second generation of wireless networks -- they were authentically different and revolutionary. Furthermore, a solid decade had gone by at that point since the first 1G networks had gone live. This stuff was definitely borne of a new generation. Still, these nascent 2G standards didn't have intrinsic, tightlycoupled support for data services woven into them. Many such networks supported text messaging, though, so that was a start -- and they also supported something called CSD, circuit-switched data. CSD allowed you to place a dial-up data call digitally, so that the network's switching station was receiving actual ones and zeroes from you rather than the screech of an analog modem. Put simply, it meant that you could transfer data faster -- up to 14.4kbps, in fact, which made it about as fast as an early- to midnineties landline modem. At the end of the day, though, CSD was a hack -- a way to repurpose these voice-centric networks for data. You still had to place a "call" to connect, so the service wasn't always available. The experience was very similar to using a dial-up modem at home: either you were online, or you weren't. Services like push email and instant messaging to your phone were basically science fiction. Furthermore, because a CSD connection was a call, you were burning minutes to get connected -- and these technologies were in play at a time when monthly minute buckets on cellular plans were measured in the dozens, not the hundreds or thousands. Unless you had a company writing a check for your wireless bill every month, using CSD for anything more than an occasional novelty wasn't practical.
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The 4G identity crisis we're dealing with today really started well over a decade ago, around the time that standards bodies were hard at work finalizing 3G technologies. The General Packet Radio Service -- GPRS -- marked a watershed moment in cellular history when it was hammered out in 1997, because it offered a bolt-on for GSM networks that permitted "always-on" data services. No more dial-up CSD silliness -- as long as your account and phone were appropriately configured, you could seamlessly use data whenever and however you needed it. For all practical purposes, your handset was permanently connected to the internet. It was also much faster than anything CSD could offer: over 100kbps in theory (though we don't recall ever getting anything much above 40kbps in practice during the service's heyday). GPRS also marked one of the first times that operators could effectively bill by the kilobyte, rather than by the minute. Kind of a good news / bad news situation there, we suppose.
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Needless to say, GPRS was a big deal -- especially since it came right at the time when people started really checking their email accounts incessantly. In fact, it was transformational. AT&T Wireless, Cingular, and VoiceStream (which would later become T-Mobile USA) all deployed the service, as did virtually every
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GSM operator in the world. It didn't earn the right to add a generational notch, though. You see, by the time GPRS was on the market, the UN's International Telecommunications Union had already put together its IMT-2000 standard, an official list of specifications that a "true" 3G technology would have to meet. Most importantly, IMT-2000 required stationary speeds of 2Mbps and mobile speeds of 384kbps -- benchmarks that GPRS couldn't meet even on its best day. And that's the story of how GPRS got stuck as a tweener: better than 2G, not good enough to be 3G. It was important enough so that it might have earned the right to be called 3G had the ITU not already drawn the line, but that's how the cookie crumbles. Turns out it would just be the first of many, many generational schisms over the next decade.
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standard generally accepted to succeed both CDMA2000 and GSM, have been thought of as "4G technologies," but that's only partially true: they both make use of a newer, extremely efficient multiplexing scheme called orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA, as opposed to the older CDMA or TDMA we've been using for the past twenty years) and they both lack a dedicated voice network -- 100 percent of their spectrum is used for data services, which means that voice calls would be treated as VoIP (not unlike Skype or Vonage). Considering how heavily datacentric our mobile society has become, that's a good thing. Where WiMAX and LTE fall short, though, is in raw speed. The former tops out at around 40Mbps and the latter around 100Mbps theoretical, while practical, real-world speeds on commercial networks so far have tended to range between around 4Mbps and 30Mbps -- well short of IMT-Advanced's lofty (and, arguably, most important) goal. Updates to these standards -- WiMAX 2 and LTE-Advanced, respectively -- promise to do the job, but neither has been finalized yet... and production networks that make use of them are still years away. That said, you could still easily argue that the original WiMAX and LTE standards are authentically different enough from the classically-defined 3G standards to call them a true generational upgrade -and indeed, most (if not all) of the carriers around the world that have deployed them have referred to them as "4G." It's an obvious marketing advantage for them, and the ITU -- for all the good it's trying to do -- has no jurisdiction to stop it. Both technologies (LTE in particular) will be deployed to many, many more carriers around the globe over the next several years, and the use of the "4G" moniker is only going to grow. It can't be stopped.
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The story's not over, though. T-Mobile USA, which has no publicly-announced plans to upgrade its HSPA network to LTE any time soon, decided late last year to start branding its HSPA+ upgrade as "4G," too. In principle, the move makes some sense: the 3G technology path will ultimately scale to speeds well beyond what mere LTE can achieve today, eventually coming within spitting distance of IMT-Advanced. There are many markets where T-Mobile's 21Mbps HSPA+ network is faster than Sprint's WiMAX network. And neither Sprint, Verizon, nor MetroPCS -- the three American carriers with live WiMAX / LTE networks -- are offering VoIP yet; they're still falling back on their 3G airwaves for voice, and will continue to do so for some time. Furthermore, T-Mobile will upgrade to 42Mbps this year, still without touching LTE! Arguably, it was T-Mobile's move that really sparked a fundamental rethinking of what "4G" means to the phone-buying public. AT&T, which is in the process of upgrading to HSPA+ and will start offering LTE in some markets later this year, is calling both of these networks 4G -- and naturally, neither Sprint nor Verizon have even thought about backing down on their end. All four US national carriers seem entrenched at this point, having successfully stolen the 4G label from the ITU -- they've taken it, run with it, and reshaped it.
Wrap-up
So where does this all leave us? In short, carriers seem to have won this battle: the ITU recently backed down, saying that the term 4G "may also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMAX, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third generation systems now deployed." And in a way, we think that's fair -- no one would argue that the so-called "4G" network of today resembles the 3G network of 2001. We can stream extremely high-quality video, upload huge files in the blink of an eye, and -- given the right circumstances -- even use some of these networks as DSL replacements. Sounds like a generational leap to us. Whether WiMAX 2 and LTE-Advanced will ultimately be called "4G" by the time they're available is unclear, but our guess is that they won't -- the experience you'll have on those networks will be vastly different than the 4G of today. And let's be honest: the world's marketing departments have no shortage of Gs at their disposal.
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2g, 3g, 4g, cdma, cdma2000, edge, ev-do, ev-do rev. 0, ev-do rev. a, Ev-doRev.0, Ev-doRev.A, gprs, gsm, hspa+, umts, wireless
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hype, what they claim to be a 4G technology falls on its face when mobile (or even just the whack of multi-path reception). Its not their fault, its the underlying technology QAM that HSPAuses (like EVDO), bandwidth erodes rapidly as speed (of travel) increases.. And that's why streaming high quality video starts to die once the train/car/bus starts moving..
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phone's 4-something-inch touchscreen. --edit-Then again, that's besides the point this article is trying to make. The point is that corporations are making this less and less transparent by throwing G's around and using them in their market strategy. Of course, this can be misleading to consumers. Then again, this has been going on literally for ages and, as usual, its all down to the consumer to make sure he's well-informed before buying a product.
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