3G: Is it really a third generation?

Well, the answer is unclear. While the distinction between the first generation and the second generation mobile communications was evident, when analogue radio standard was replaced by a new and revolutionary type of packet data transfer (narrow-band at that time though) with lots of new possibilities and services available that changed the way of perceiving mobile communications drastically, today there is no clear boundary between the old and the new. Some say the technologies are merging into one another in a natural and evolutionary way. Others believe there has been a revolutionary change in the technologies enabling mobile service providers to increase their bandwidth up to 2 megabit per second – something that many of us believed to be impossible in the near future.

It turns out that both of these points of view are right, as they are based on different technologies developing. Let's try to analyze what could cause such divergence of opinions. The first thing that needs to be understood by everyone is that third generation networks, or 3G, is not a name for a single and unified technology designed to replace old and outdated second generation networks. Nor are the 2G technologies unified and standard. Many of us already faced the problem of being unable to use our mobile phones when visiting a foreign country, especially if you live in the US and fly to a European country. That means you have a mobile phone that supports a completely different technology from the one that is used by mobile operators of the country you are visiting. A pretty annoying thing, isn't it? Europeans may face the same problem in the US though. So what are these technologies and why are they so different? It turns out that the biggest mobile operators in the USA, as well as most of the carriers in Japan, Korea and some other Asian countries have chosen the digital technology called CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and all European countries mostly use GSM which is a global digital standard of mobile communication with an additional technology called GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) for packet data transfer. So here we come to the difference between the evolutionary and the revolutionary way of development. 3G in USA and Asia is completely different from 3G in Europe. On the one hand, the CDMA technology is being gradually and permanently developed for the purpose of improvement of the broadband radio technology, which enables higher speed of internet connection for the users – in the modern stage the technology is called CDMA2000, which is actually a third generation standard. On the other hand, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) that utilizes the technology called W-CDMA is another, absolutely new technology developed and used in European countries that theoretically can provide the speed of 14 megabit per second. It is sometimes called 3GSM which means it is supposed to be the successor of the GSM technology with higher, third generation speeds of data transfer. So these two major technologies are both third generation systems allowing mobile internet access with higher speeds in relation to the technologies they have superseded, as well as the new revolutionary way of communication - video calls, which is something no one of us could imagine to be possible a few years ago. The difference between them is the nature of the technologies themselves, and the standards of broadband radio technologies they use.