----- Original Message ----- From: Anders Ljung To: Elektrosmog Sent: Monday, April 15, 2002 5:30 PM

Subject: [elektrosmog] WLAN / UMTS what's the right thing? Maybe communication competitiveness.

Beyond 3G --- 4G --- 5G

When Telecom goes IP.
The next generations of cellular phones are close, soon there will be new services and new phones for all of us that are mobile, the big Telecom companies are investing heavily in the new 3G network. They all promise us that we will be able to surf the Internet with 2 Mbps and that this will be possible in big cities and along big routes.

At the same time there are a whole lot of early adopters that starts building WLAN (mostly 802.11b) areas, sometime for free and sometime they charge you for the use of the Internet a technique that is also starting to find it’s way to a great number of business people and offices. So here we have different techniques for communicating and some really argue whether or not the free and new WLAN even is a competitor to the big business and all the money investing in 3G (UMTS).
What will come after this, when SDR (Software Defined Radio) and new radio techniques will make it possible to communicate with higher bandwidth and in networks where all of these devices and new ones can co-exist and the traffic is all IP.

3G
The new network that is being built around the country, the new, revolutionary network that will bring us into the closer to the Internet with higher bandwidth and better quality. The promise is that you will have high bandwidth and secure transmission and whether or not this is true or not is not relevant for this article but will this be sufficient to deal with the greater need of connectivity, especially since 3G is not primarily a computer network.

The future

Among technicians the next generation, 4G and 5G, networks are discussed and there are experiments being done to prove that we have to move on and make the new networks deal with many different devices and we have to make them all IP in order to deal efficiently with the traffic. SDR or Software defined radio is already present today but it will really make the making of radio equipment much more efficient and, possibly, cheaper. It will also make it, together with more efficient antennas, easier to develop new technologies for radio communication with greater bandwidth and better coverage. This, in turn, will make it easier for different devices to co-exist within the same physical device. It then opens a way for seamless communication with different communication technologies. the 802.11b,e, g and a technologies are maybe under rated in terms of competitiveness towards the more traditional 2G and 3G networks that are being built. The more we can develop the WLAN networks that are being implemented by various groups the closer we get to 4G and 5G and the more we are able to use the network for different tasks, much more than just voice communication.

Summary

We should be more careful before we invest in technology that maybe obsolete in just a few years and instead look into the possibilities that are ahead. Make it easier for the groups that are trying to build the comprehensive new WLAN networks, today in big cities, tomorrow in all populated areas. By the time today’s WLAN networks are accessible enough the technology has caught up with the new explorers and it can all be integrated into a more flexible network that grow within the network and you don't have to scarp the old network to implement the next generation, the generations to come.

/Anders