3-G HOW YOU CAN BENEFIT

iPhone: The 3GS hit US shelves last Friday. The older 8MB iPhone 3G is down to $99


Nokia: Has dozens of 3G handsets, from the low-end 2730 classic (Rs7,000) and the midrange E52 (Rs14,000) to the topend N97 (Rs35,000). Their predecessors (E50 and E51, between Rs8,000 and Rs11,000) too are 3G phones


Vodafone 3G cards: 3G cards and high-speed USB modems such as this and Tata Indicom’s Photon+ promise 3 Mbps or more download speeds. While real-life speeds will scrape 1 Mbps, that’s over 10 times what you can get today

Google Android: Powers the HTC Dream handset (aka the TMobile G1) and depends heavily on 3G

While the state-run BSNL and MTNL have been dabbling in 3G since last year, they haven’t made big inroads despite aggressive pricing, partly due to spotty coverage. But there are also some 3G or near-3G options if you’re looking for fast data from CDMA operators

Now, with the finance ministry finally giving the green signal, the auction of spectrum for 3G—and the roll-out of services by Airtel, Reliance and other private players—is round the corner

Why 3G? All mobile phones make voice calls well butmost struggle with data, especially the heavy stuff—file downloads, big emails, graphics, video. That’s where 3G comes in. A 3G phone will do file or video downloads much faster than your current mobile phone

3G, or third generation, is a group of technologies that allows much faster speeds than the older GSM mobile phone system we mostly use today, informally called 2G. It isn’t one standard, but a family of technologies that allow fast wireless connections over a large area, including CDMA2000 (the 3G variant of CDMA), UMTS (universal mobile 14 16 en years after the birth of 3G, it’s finally here. Well, almostYou have a choice of dozens of inexpensive 3G phones. You can even buy a 3G service to telecommunications system) and others, with Wimax (worldwide interoperability for microwave access) added most recently, two years ago. They all allow fast wireless connections over a large area

What do you need? Just a compatible phone, and a subscription to a 3G service. Many modern phones—especially above Rs10,000—are 3G-ready. But the service isn’t so easy to find. The government-run BSNL and MTNL run 3G services, which is limited to some areas. For instance, I use an MTNL 3G modem on my laptop, but it does not work at 3G speeds in Gurgaon and in most of Delhi—it just works at the same low speeds my old data card runs at. But this should change when telephone companies such as Airtel start selling 3G services later this year

For now, though, if you need fast data access on the go, you can buy high-speed data cards or plug-in USB modems from Reliance and Tata Indicom. They don’t like to call them 3G so as not to upset the government, which hasn’t allowed private players to offer 3G services yet. So they use names such as Photon+, and offer “up to 3 Mbps” download speeds. But they’re 3G all right. They can’t sell it for phone handsets yet, though—just for data cards

What you can do with it Once you have a 3G phone and service, , y - t - n e o d you can, for starters, use data services together with voice calls (with your old GSM services, you can’t do both at the same time: When you make a call, your data connection is put on hold, and email downloads and other data activity suspended while your call is on). And 3G is fast enough for IP telephony, so you can make cheap long-distance calls

Second, your normal data activity speeds up with 3G—email and browsing, which are slow on a GSM mobile, be come crisp and snappy. You’ll be able to go to watch YouTube videos, which you can’t do on a GSM GPRS connection. A good way to get a flavour of what it feels like is to switch on Wi-Fi, if your phone supports that. Then connect to your office or home Wi-Fi network and try browsing, viewing YouTube videos, etc

It’s quick, like you’d expect on a PC with a broadband connection. That’s how it will be with 3G

Then you can make a video call with someone else who has a 3G phone and service. That’s a phone call where you can see the caller over live video. Each phone should have 3G webcam, which is really a low-resolution, front-facing camera
And you can buy a 3G card or USB mo- dem—even today—to plug into your laptop, to speed up your browsing on the go

When? When? When? If you’re tired of hearing about how good 3G’s going to be, future tense, I don’t blame you. 3G is 10 years old. The ITU (International Telecom Union) defined the set of standards called IMT-2000, informally called 3G, in 1999, to allow for future growth, bandwidth and diverse multimedia applications

For now, there’s 2.5G. You probably al- 13 15 ready have it, if you subscribe to GPRS data. 2.5G is a bit faster than 2G...and a stepping stone to 3G. Plain old GSM, or 2G, is too slow for data, working at a so last-century 14.4 kbps. But the commonly available GPRS or EDGE service which, like 3G, is a packet-switched technology, is faster. EDGE claims speeds of 144 kbps (though you can actually expect about half of that). On the CDMA side, there’s CDMA2000 1x, also “nearly 3G”.

But 3G is much faster

What’s next? 4G? Yes, and it’s already on the cards. The fourth generation of mobile tech is expec- 14 16 ted to be based on IP, the same standard powering the Internet, with integrated facilities such as voice, data and streaming multimedia—and much faster speeds, exceeding 100 Mbps

4G will make way for the next generation of services, such as high-quality video (including HDTV). And it won’t distinguish between voice and data. Everything will run on IP, using a new address system called IPv6

Just as 3G isn’t one standard, 4G too is a family of standards. The difference is that they are intended to be interoperable, with “smooth handoff across networks”.Whichmeans that if you’re travelling down the highway watching a movie online on a particular service provider, and you move into an area where the signal’s weak, your video viewer will look for another, different service and smoothly hand over to that service without interrupting your video, while you move at 60 miles an hour

Prasanto K. Roy is chief editor at CyberMedia

Qualcomm: Plans to power smartbooks and next-gen smartphones with its Snapdragon 3G chipsets

MTNL 3G: You can use MTNL’s 3G service in New Delhi and Mumbai with phone handsets or USB modems. The price for the service ranges from Rs250 a month to an unlimited data plan for Rs2,500

Samsung S8300: Samsung’s 8MP, autofocus S8300 (Rs27,000) phone lets you take high-quality images and have them appear on the Web in minutes

Smartbooks: These next-gen devices will fill the gap between smartphones and netbooks, as in this prototype from Freescale. They can be switched on instantly, are always connected “to the cloud”, and run all day on a single charge.