Is the Bar Raised Too High for Cingular?
January 11, 2007, 6:45 PM
Scott Fulton, BetaNews: The world's mobile broadband standards were not devised to intentionally be in competition with one another, yet when competing cellular providers get their hands on them, they suddenly are. Cingular is the largest cellular provider in the US, and is now wholly owned by AT&T, by virtue of its merger with former partner RBOC, BellSouth. This week, Cingular has had one of the biggest cellular device announcements at CES, for the Palm Treo 750; and certainly the biggest one outside of CES, for the Apple iPhone. But neither device is geared to use the HSDPA higher-speed 3G network, which is supposedly being championed by Cingular.
We asked our analyst, Sharon Fisher, to figure out the meaning behind Cingular's HSDPA developments, or the lack thereof.
Sharon Fisher, BetaNews Senior CES Analyst: The question is, what is happening in terms of 3G broadband wireless in the GSM world?
GSM is the most popular cellular phone technology – it's what Cingular and T-Mobile use. And their initial attempt at being able to transmit data is called Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution (EDGE), which is what the Apple iPhone is supposed to use for transmitting data.
Now, as you recall, some people who heard about the iPhone were upset because it wasn't using 3G technology. The reason they're upset is that EDGE isn't as fast as 3G and can't transmit as much data, particularly video. The 3G technology for GSM, particularly in Europe, is called Universal Mobile Telephone System (UMTS). As of September, some 83.6 million people were said to be using UMTS. Cingular built an entire separate network to support UMTS, and that's the network we mentioned the other day when we were talking about 3G. EDGE provides data speeds between 75 Kbps and 135 Kbps, while 3G/UMTS can be up to 700 Kbps.
The specification that UMTS uses is called HSDPA, for High Speed Downlink Packet Access. There's several other services around the world that support this specification as well.
But the eventual goal of the GSM community is called LTE, for Long-Term Evolution, according to Ken Rehbehn, an analyst with Current Analysis. And that will take advantage, he says, of technology such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, like WiMAX does. That's probably three or four years out.
And all of these high-speed GSM-based data transmission technologies, like UMB, have the advantage of better mobility than WiMAX. That's because they're based on the existing cellular network.
UMB, HSDPA, and WiMAX are all likely to continue to coexist for some time, Rehbehn said. WiMAX is faster for fixed mobile, while both UMB and HSDPA are better for mobility, and people whose phones use one network can still talk to people whose phones use the other networks.
The other interesting thing is that Qualcomm is involved with UMTS as well, so it get royalties and money no matter whether CDMA or GSM is being used on the data side. That's because GSM/UMTS was originally using a technology called time-division multiplexing, and they've now moved to the CDMA technology. It's because of the switch in technologies that Cingular had to build a completely different UMTS network.
Scott Fulton: So I get it now: Cingular is banking on the plan that three or four years out, mobile broadband users will want to be mobile during their use, and not be stuck in one place or one area. I've used EV-DO in a moving car before, and although I'm able to retain service moving over cellular service boundaries, oftentimes over boundaries that are near state lines, I lose my signal. Now I think I understand why. Thanks for the insight.
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