13.1 Introduction

For a long time the wireless data wave has been muted as the biggest change in mobile service offerings that will open up new opportunities. With the launch of GSM data services the data wave was said to be beginning to build up ready to wash into the market-place but it did not happen. Many factors were missing, the most important of these being the basic data rate was too low and there was a lack of consumer terminals available to the user.

At GSM's conception, discussions of two bands of services (classed as 'slow' below 4.8 kbit/s, and 'fast' above 4.8 kbit/s) were promoted widely. By the time these came to the market, all were clearly 'slow' and, with modem technology in the home offering 28.8 kbit/s, this clearly made the GSM offering unattractive. 3rd generation (3G) had to overcome these basic issues especially as the World Wide Web was pervading our everyday lives and corporate intranets had become the key mechanism for information storage and dissemination.

Therefore the key questions on everybody's lips were: 'What are we really going to do with this 3G capability?' and 'How much will it cost?' With the hindsight of the GSM experience a trials activity was planned to examine these two basic questions. The plan concentrated on validating the radio system that promised radically different...