3.1 Introduction Evolution from 2G to 3G

Mobile telephones have been a tremendous success story. Although GSM was originally conceived as a pan-European system there are now over 400 operators in 169 countries worldwide [1]. Since the launch of the first GSM systems in the early 1990s, customer numbers have grown very quickly resulting in today's highly competitive mass market. In particular, the more recent development of 'pre-pay' packages has been very successful in attracting new customers. For many mobile operators more than 50% of their customers use pre-pay. At present, GSM use is dominated by voice services, although there has been a great increase in uses for the short message service (SMS), a text-based messaging system. GSM provides a 'circuit-switched' data service similar to PSTN dial-up data services. The nominal GSM data rate is 9.6 kbit/s. In recent years, a new coding scheme has been approved that takes this data rate to 14.4 kbit/s although not all operators will adopt this. However, these data rates do not provide high-speed access to services such as e-mail and the World Wide Web (WWW). Also, the use of 'circuit-switched' connections, where the channel is dedicated to one user, is not the most efficient way of carrying the 'bursty' traffic of these types of services that are accessed over the Internet.

Why evolve to 3G? Just as the advent of the WWW has generated a 'datawave' on the fixed network, it is expected that the...