Just to keep up with what’s going on in the hardware side of mobile phones, this is a good article about the efforts underway to plan the migration of mobile networks to 4G. It’s early, but 4G will be a tricky thing to implement… “3G was primarily vendor and regulator driven, with the two main industry coalitions developing their own standards under the ITU umbrella standard IMT-2000. 4G will be a far more complex animal, encompassing a variety of technologies, from wide-area cellular and wireless broadband networks to mobile TV and personal-area networks using UWB, Bluetooth and ZigBee, all IP-enabled for seamless mobility between them.”
Interestingly for me, I found out that LTE (which I encountered in an article yesterday) is the new shorthand name for Super 3G…the official name is “UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Node Long Term Evolution (UTRAN LTE)”.
4G won’t be launched before the end of the decade (and possible a fair bit later) and there are some challenges to overcome in addition to the complexity…”spectrum availability, deployment costs and developing terminals that can cope with a multiple-access environment and — perhaps more importantly — all the multimedia that the environment will be throwing at it…The spectrum issue is of course mainly up to regulators while the cost of deployment will vary from one operator to another. One constant, says Behmann, is that existing cellcos will need a lot more base stations than they have now to get the kinds of speeds that 4G will demand.”
And residents don’t like base stations…
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