1. INTRODUCTION

Over the past 10 years, wireless voice communication has grown from a rarity to a necessity. In contrast, wireless data services at rates and price sufficient to generate equal excitement remain elusive. In response, the wireless industry has proposed third generation systems with rates in the hundreds of kilobit per second range. However, the dominant traffic on such systems will probably be voice at least initially, and here lies a Catch-22 first observed by Roy Yates here at WINLAB [1].

Consider that the bit rate currently associated with voice communications is on the order of 10 kbps and let us use this voice channel rate as our unit of measure. This channel costs ? cents per minute. It therefore costs approximately 13 ? cents to transmit a one megabyte file prohibitively expensive at current rates. In addition, what is particularly interesting is that this basic fact does not change with the introduction of higher rate services as long as voice is the dominant traffic. One megabyte of data always costs 13 ? cents since the basic voice channel rate is unlikely to change drastically for both economic and legacy reasons. Thus, unless normal voice communications becomes essentially free, it seems that wireless data will never be inexpensive when provided using a cellular architecture.

This conundrum causes us to re-examine the cellular paradigm. Specifically, cellular wireless was built to carry voice traffic for people accustomed to the reliability and ubiquity of fixed telephone service. Thus, the...