Conclusion

The development trend in telecommunications is driven by user service requirements asking for access to a diversified range of personalised set of services to anyone, anywhere, anytime but not at any price. Borders between telecommunications, information technology and entertainment services are disappearing and users can combine service offerings from various operators. Deregulated world-wide market and rapid introduction of mobile services of the second generation, specifically GSM, has lead to the conclusion that one "ultimate mobile solution ", one radio access network and one single core network standardised to a very detailed level is not realistic. Flexibility and opportunities of choice within mobile communications are avaiIable to a large extent already today. The choice is available for users, service operators, network operators and manufacturers. Consequently UMTS development takes into account the opportunity of the choice and the multiplicity of futed and mobile telecommunication networks and services. Several of these systems can evolve towards UMTS with their own targets and pace. Such facts are influencing the current standardisation process at both national, regional.

The evolution path of 3G/UMTS as well as its some aspects give us an overall general picture of 3G really is a necessary step after all. Technically speaking, 3G is an advancement over present GSM services, able to offer much in terms of quality multimedia services. However, for users of mobile telephony, it is not so important to them what sort of technology makes communication possible. It is the type of service and the quality of the service that they obtain that is of more importance to them. What users want are services that make things more convenient and accessible. GSM is predominantly a voice service technology and this was the most important service to offer at the time when GSM was introduced because mobile telephones should offer just that: Telephone services but with mobility. However, it has since evolved to encompass some data services such as SMS and some internet access capability. Further enhancements allowed even faster access to the Internet and to other services. With 3G and UMTS, even more services can be introduced to the public.


In my country, Vietnam, we have six mobile service providers, yet none of them offer 3G services. Two mobile technologies have been using there. A half of providers uses GSM technology. And the rest uses cdma-1x. The quality service of cdma-1x in my country is not good. The calls sometimes drop or speech is delayed. Even the strategists of cdma-1x companies created a lot of advertisement campaigns or sale promotion, they can not attract the customers who had used GSM services. GSM providers gain over 70 percent of mobile market. 3G technology has just been setting up the fundamental platform in Vietnam mobile service market. For example, ZTE Corporation, China's largest listed telecommunications manufactures and leading wireless solutions provider, is to install Vietnam's first 3G network in Ho Chi Minh city. ZTE will provide a network based on the Corporation's 450 MHz EV-DO (EVolution - Data Optimized or EVolution - Data Only) technology, which will bring 3G technology to the seven million inhabitants of Vietnam's largest city. I hope that Vietnames will soon have chance to use the 3G services in the near future.

The role of standards

3GPP held its first meetings in December 1998 after agreements between the regional standards bodies (ETSI, AFUB, and others) were made to focus the development of UMTS and WCDMA technologies under a single global project. The 3GPP Release '99 physical layer interface is now becoming stable and work is proceeding on the subsequent annual releases of the specifications, known as Releases 4 and 5.

The need for industry concensus on certain design and implementation issues calls for the need for standardisation on agreed areas. For example, the UTRA air interface is standardised clearly in 3GPP; this allows multiple vendor equipments to be introduced into the market, thus driving competition. Thus standardisation is needed in cases where interfaces between vendor equipments exist. In such cases, resources expended constitute overhead and visibility of the standards process enables competitor intelligence gathering. However, more crucially, standardisation can be used to enforce technology leadership and thus competive advantage.

On the other hand, evolution can remain vendor specific; for instance, it may not be necessary to standardise a particular receiver algorithm which functions within a terminal or basestation; in these cases, equipment is not prevented from multi-vendor functioning where no standardisation exists, but the performance or cost to market may differ from one vendor to another.

3GPP Road map

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a collaboration agreement that was established in December 1998. The collaboration agreement brings together a number of telecommunications standards bodies which are known as "Organizational partners". The current Organizational Partners are ARIB/TTC (Japan), CCSA (China), ETSI (Europe), ATIS (North America), and TTA (South Korea).

The original scope of 3GPP was to produce globally applicable Technical Specifications and Technical Reports for a 3rd Generation Mobile System based on evolved GSM core networks and the radio access technologies that they support (i.e., Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA) both Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) modes). The scope was subsequently amended to include the maintenance and development of the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) Technical Specifications and Technical Reports including evolved radio access technologies (e.g. General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE)).

3GPP releases:

• Release 99: Complete. Include enhancements to GSM/GPRS (EDGE). Support for GSM/EDGE/GPRS/WCDMA radio-access network. Most deployment today uses R99.
• Release 4: Complete. MMS support. Efficient interconnection of CN infrastructure over IP networks.
• Release 5: Complete. Delivered HSDPA and first phase of IMS. Half of WCDMA network
  deployments now include the HSDPA evolution.
• Release 6: Complete. Includes HSUPA, enhanced multimedia support using Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Services (MBMS), performance specifications for advanced receivers, WLAN integration, and evolution of the IP Multimedia System IMS.
• Release 7: On-going (expected mid-2007). Enhanced GSM data functionality. Optimisation/fine tuning of earlier releases for performance enhancements, improved spectral efficiency, increased capacity, and better resistance to interference. Also provides optimisations for VoIP over HSPA.
• Release 8: In progress (expected 2009). Constitutes a refactoring of UMTS as an intirely IP based fourth generation network.
  

UMTS Market aspects

The wireless communications business has experienced an exceptional growth during the last 10 years. This growth has been particularly remarkable in those markets in which GSM was the dominant standard, Europe and Asia Pacific. GSM economies of scale and its fundamental characteristics such as global roaming and competitive short message services (SMS) helped this boost. Current global volumes were not expected in any existing forecast. Figure 5 displays the evolution of the cellular subscribers worldwide from 1991 and shows several forecasts for the coming years, which indicate that the cellular subscriber growth rate is expected to continue growing during this decade.


During the 1990s, with the introduction of second-generation (digital) standards, voice telephony went wireless. The 1990s was also the decade of the Internet take off, with Internet-based multimedia services (MMSs) becoming increasingly popular and the web becoming the ‘de facto’ world information database. Second-generation (2G) cellular standards were, however, not designed to support these new Internet-based services and applications. Third-generation (3G) standards are meant to become the vehicle for Internet based multimedia and other data services to go wireless as well.

Key drivers of UMTS market:

• Growth in the market for fixed networked multimedia services.
• Increasing demand for rapid and remote access to information.
• eCommerce and transaction based applications.

Key enablers of UMTS market:

• Appropriate regulatory framework.
• Advances in spectrum efficient radio technologies and data compression techniques.
• Development of open UMTS standards.
• Improvement in user interface design and display technologies.
• Reduced size, power, and cost of mobile devices.
• Early of exploitation of GPRS and GSM services.

However, UMTS market also has to face with some barriers such as:

• Security and fraud issues.
• High cost and limited availability of spectrum.
• High cost of UMTS technology.
• Poor coverage and incomplete roaming.

A lot of mobile operators have had to pay large sums of money for 3rd Generation operating licences. In Europe, some of the highest amounts paid came from German and British Mobile operators. In Germany, the cost per licence was approximately US$ 7.6 billion and in the UK, it ranged from US$ 6.3 to US$ 9.4 billion. This has led to many operators having less resource for putting in place of 3G infrastructure and has caused delays in the commercial launch of the services. While some operators had to pay billions for the licences, there were others, such as Finland and Sweden that were awarded licences for much smaller sums of money. The disadvantage that these operators had was that rollout had to happen at a much faster rate as compared to operators who paid high sums of money.

There are operators who did not obtain licences to operate a 3rd Generation network, either due to not having been selected or having decided not to bid for the licences. A good alternative technology to UMTS is that of EDGE, which allows users to have reasonable quality of multimedia services over the GSM network.

In summary, the advantage of 3G to mobile operators is the new revenue generation that would steam from services offered to users. With data services becoming more important day by day and mobility becoming an essential part of life, it is most likely that these new mobile data and internet services will draw many users. The reason why many operators were willing to pay such large sums of money for 3G licences speaks for itself. They predict that revenue that will be obtained from 3G services and applications will sometime down the road, make their investments worthwhile and reap profits for them.

In addition, if a technology offers high performance differential with low incremental complexity and it is available quickly, it is likely that the sales effort needed will be low. Conversely, if the technology offers a more limited performance-complexityavailability combination, the technology could still be marketed, but a more intensive sales and marketing effort will be needed. Often, technologies that do offer significant incremental performance but also demand high complexity implementation do not achieve market success. Optimisation of the four parameters: sales and marketing effort, performance, complexity and availability will contribute to success.

UMTS Technical aspects

The technical advantages of 3G are far more than that of 2G and its enhancements such as GPRS and EDGE. GSM was originally deployed as a circuit switched network for voice services. However, when it was deduced that data services will bring in more revenue, it led to operators upgrading their circuit switched networks with a packet switched data network on top of it. Although 3G was already conceived, the enhanced GSM network would provide data and voice services in the meantime. Circuit switched networks have always been used for voice services in organizations and the most obvious advantage is that of higher access speeds. When networks introduce UMTS, users will be able to experience a maximum speed of 2Mbps indoors and 384Kbps outdoors. Although these numbers are only theoretical maximums achievable, practically, the average should be around 300Kbps, and this would allow users to experience multimedia type services.

The big advantage of 3G is that it introduces entirely packet based networks. As compared to early GSM which was a circuit switched based network. Enhancement to GSM had introduced packet switching with GPRS and EDGE. However, with a fully IP based network such as UMTS, a lot more advantages are possible.

Quality of service, which was not fully addressed by GSM and its enhancements, is another advantage of UMTS. With UMTS, quality of service measures has been incorporated in to the technology to make sure that spectrum allocation is optimized. This means that for a particular type of data service, e.g. multimedia video streaming, the appropriate amount of bandwidth will be allocated by the network for that particular service to ensure that the user experience is maximized.

Because of the employment of WCDMA and direct sequence spread spectrum techniques, spectral efficiency is also increased for UMTS, as compared to GSM. Because of the nature of WCDMA, the spectrum available is translated into high data rates and this is ideal for high bandwidth data requirements.

The security aspects of UMTS are also an improvement over that of GSM, although what security functions found in UMTS are generally improved versions of GSM security functions. In GSM, security for users was found in the SIM and the radio interface was encrypted. In UMTS, encryption in the air interface is now broadened to include the base stations and radio network controller connections as well. Other security features have also been included in the base stations and in data authentication. 6 Therefore, in terms of security, UMTS does show and improvement over GSM. However, like every other system, it is not a fully secure one and is vulnerable to misuse and abuse.

UMTS Services aspects

UMTS services are based on common capabilities throughout all UMTS user and radio environment. The purposes of UMTS are:

• Enabling users to access a wide range of telecommunications services, including many that are today undefined as well as multimedia and high data rates.
• Allowing the difference between service offering of various serving networks and home environments.
• Providing support for interfaces which allow the use of terminals normally connected to fixed networks.
  
• Facilitating the provision of small, easy to use, low cost terminal with long talk time and long standby operation.
• Providing an efficient means of using networks (specially spectrum).

Based on above objectives, specific requirement related to services are outlined in the ETSI specifications. Data rates offered for bearer services are:

• 144 kbits/s for satellite and rural outdoor
• 384 kbits/s for urban outdoor
• 2048 kbits/s for indoor and low range outdoor
  

UMTS network services have different QoS classes for four types of traffic:

• Conversational (voice, video telephony, video gaming) This is characterized by low delay tolerance, low jitter (delay variation) and low error tolerance. The data rate requirement may be high or low, but is generally symmetrical.
• Streaming (multimedia, video on demand, webcast) This concerns one-way services, using low- to high-bit rates. Streaming services have a low-error tolerance, but generally have a high tolerance for delay and jitter. That is because the receiving application usually buffers data so that it can be played to the user in a synchronized manner.
• Interactive (web browsing, network gaming, database access) This consists of typically request/response-type transactions. Interactive traffic is characterized by low tolerance for errors, but with a larger tolerance for delays than conversational services. Jitter (delay variation) is not a major impediment to interactive services, provided that the overall delay does not become excessive.
• Background (email, SMS, downloading) This is characterized by little, if any, delay constraint.
  

Implementation and Integration aspects in UMTS

Research studies aiming to improve the overall performance of multiple access techniques such as WCDMA or TDCDMA have provided interesting and applicable methods. However, these results may not necessarily be part of the first UTRA commercial systems in the next 2 years. Thus, it will be some time before techniques such as Software Radio, Adaptive Antennas, and Multi-user Detection enhance capacity, coverage and increase system stability.

Implementation and integration appear as key limitations to bring these advanced techniques into operating systems or near future11 exploitable networks. Processing power demands for example, do not allow rapid implementation of the above methods. Furthermore, integrating such techniques into smaller components is a great challenge. This means, that while less optimum supporting techniques like system on a chip, maximizing power consumption, or operating at very low power come into place; the aforementioned improvements will remain academic.

At present, while UMTS frequency licensing becomes big business for governments, operators seem to have fall into the spin of supremacy and consolidation for market share and have somehow forgotten the timeliness of technology. Manufacturers are finding themselves in a race to supply plain vanilla solutions and are incapable of implementing true breakthroughs in multiple access or radio-access techniques.

Thus, it seems reasonable to think that it may be to the benefit of industry as a whole and governments themselves to concentrate on putting more resources into the realization of new communications technologies than just coping with spectrum allocation and acquisition to offer services with higher transmission rates. Such an approach will make UMTS a clear platform for advanced technology from the start and not just one more alternative to provide new mobile applications.