What is Wrong with 3G? [Archive]

rmwambu

2012-03-20, 08:26 PM

Wasn’t 3G not supposed to be about voice and SMS but whizzy new services: video calling, football highlights, interactive games. If 3G is as good as the marketing hype then why do we need 3.5G at all?

The first thing that turned out to be more hype than performance from 3G was the data rate. Coverage of 3G networks is still patchy – meaning some of the time data users are back. on GPRS rates. READ FURTHER AT: http://trends-in-telecoms.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-is-wrong-with-3g_07.html

s52d

2012-03-21, 02:32 PM

Hi!

Looking from the year 2012, there are many other reassons why UTRAN is flawed.
Cell breathing, ATM and reuse 1 are not really uniqe: simmilar problems are inherent to WiMax and LTE as well.

Anyhow, considering technology level in 1997 (when main R99 decisions were made),
UTRAN is quite nice sollution to problems, estimated to exist 10 years ago.
Remember: GPRS was in standardization (uh, ugly R97 standards) and not in the networks,
ISDN was considered broadband, and only trials were doing ADSL or IP/over TVcable.
Compared with 128k ISDN, 384 is quite an achivement!

Few years later: ADSL etc pushed internet access speeds over one Mbit/sec,
ISDN was history, EDGE was barely adequate and R99 UTRAN was obsolete.

Here comes Wimax trying to bridge the gap, and HSPA to stop WiMax.
Both work somehow, but they are not clean usable sollutions.
HSPA on top of R99 suffers from R99 compatibility and become overcomplicated with HSPA+.

It is 10 years after UTRAN that we got LTE R8. Slightly less between HSPA and LTEa.
I agree: today I would be happy to have LTEa and GSM without UTRAN. (if terminals are available).
Even iHSPA without R99 compatibility, RNCs etc would be much better as HSPA+ as it is today.
And yes, in few years we will start switching off HSPA+, and we will hope we never had any
terminals without LTE support in the network.

It is BSS that I really admire: those engineers doing it in late 80ies really had a vision to design
simple and robust that we can not complain about 25 years later, and we might happily use for the next 10 years.
Can you point out something done wrong back in 80ies? (considering state of technology of that time)

BR
s52d