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...video and digital television are predicted to be the drivers of what has been termed 4G networks

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Evenbasic handsets have a camera and are Internet-ready.

This two-part article describes several key technology trends that will influence the design of mobile phone applications in the coming years.

It is important to understand the proliferation of different kinds of cellular phone standards, handsets and hardware parameters that affect the compatibility of various applications across various demographics. Various applications specifically for the mobile phone market that are gaining ground include the traditional mass markets of mobile banking, gaming and location-based services.

In the year 2002, a set of papers detailing records of the original GSM task force were compiled. In this set, a study by Josef Huber methodically deconstructed the market model, traffic trends and the technology parameters classified by services, and offered predictions of the same between years 2005-2010. This study was carried out primarily to arrive at an appropriate methodology for spectrum allocation. These predictions are shown in the table accompanying story.

Both usage statistics and technology parameters, especially bandwidth (owing to the increased role of packet switched networks) have far exceeded initial expectations and predictions.

Furthermore, the success of such technologies as VoIP has, in effect, validated the push towards 4G networks, with a predominantly IP backbone. In addition to this, the least common denominator when it comes to features, even in low-cost handsets, is pretty exhaustive, thereby enabling various new applications.

Four generations of mobile telephony

The earliest version of mobile phones was the two-way radio, primarily used to communicate on set frequencies, not utilising the telephone network. Between 1910 and 1973, the technology saw several steps in its evolution. In 1973, Motorola demonstrated the DynaTAC prototype, which was probably the first commercial version of what is today smaller and lighter by several orders of magnitude. These were still analog devices and the introduction of the 2G standard, which was the term used for TDMA and CDMA systems, came about in the 1990s, to introduce digital, circuit switched transmission. The phones in this generation still weighed about 200 gm at their lightest and saw the introduction of several commercial services such as the short message service (SMS), downloadable ring tones and roaming.

3G networks saw the introduction of competing standards including WCDMA and CDMA2000. Although these standards had to stay cohesive with the IMT-2000 specification (standards of data-rates around 384 kbits/s outside and 2Mbit/s inside), they introduced a lot of heterogeneity. Intermediate standards such as 2.5G networks were also introduced to buffer the transition between 2G and 3G such that at the end of 2007, the subscriber base for GSM had reached nearly 300 million.

Although the proliferation of mobile phone technology has far exceeded expectations, the data-rates on circuit-switched digital networks have not scaled as well. While the main driver for 2G networks was voice, newer applications such as video and digital television are predicted to be the drivers of what has been termed 4G networks, as the limits of short-range communication evolve.

The proliferation of handsets

While network technology progressed in supporting higher data rates and more features, one of the greatest leaps in subscriber base occurred when the Asian continents started to engage with mobile phones. Given that the population density in this part of the world is unparalleled, two driving factors determined the success of both handsets and network technology, first movers and price.

Even though GSM was adopted early in India and China, the handset prices drove the subscriber base, in the initial years. There were many reviews that brought out the fact that even though 2.5G and 3G services were available to subscribers, the price of the handset forced them to choose 2G phones, thereby rendering a lot of the services redundant. Pricing services based on customer requirements has bridged this gap and instruments are more capable, even at the lowest prices, in the current market.

Features of the handsets include price, memory, image-resolution and ability to connect to the Internet. In profiling these parameters for 42 handsets from the leading brands, based on various price-points, it is observed that the most basic handset still has a camera and is Internet-ready. The price-points and concerns about majority of subscribers in the Asian countries using 2G instruments by reason of price are slowly being bridged. It would be interesting and relevant to perform a fine-grained analysis on how the predictions by the GSM committee and studies on spectrum provisioning translate to the Indian market.

In part two of this article, trends in the application space will be explained in detail, including traditional and emerging applications such as gaming, finance, location-based services (such as Foursquare) and E-911.

This data was obtained from Josef Huber’s paper on Spectrum Aspects in the UMTS Related Work of the European Commission, UMTS Task Force, UMTS Forum and GSM Association.