3G Mobile Phones: What The Heck Is 3G Anyway?

There has been a lot of hype as to the 3G technology in mobile telephony. What the heck is 3G? 3G technology is the latest technology in mobile communications and it stands for ‘third generation’. Earlier standards, first and Second Generation, which were analog cellular technology and digital/PCS technologies respectively, have been replaced by the faster 3G technology. 3G mobile phones are intended to be true multimedia cell phones that offer increased bandwidth and transfer rates that accommodate phone-based audio and video files as well as web-based applications. Typically, smart phones are 3G mobile phones.

Compared to earlier 2G phones with a download speed of up to 144Kbps, 3G mobile phones have transfer speeds of 3Mbps (. This means that while it would take you about 8 minutes to download a 3-minute song on a 2G phone, it would take you only 15 seconds to make the same download on a 3G phone. This opens up opportunities for 3G mobile phones to be used to download large multimedia files from the internet and send and receive large files at these 3G high data rates. Furthermore, these phones act as mini-laptops being able to support broadband applications like video streaming from the web, video conferencing and instant email downloads with attachments.

3G mobile phones use certain mobile telecommunications standards which includes GSM EDGE, CDMA2000 and UMTS. Others include DECT and WiMAX. So if you come across a phone or equipment with these labels then you can sure than 3G technology is in use there. There are also other cool things that are made possible by 3G technology. For example, you can use 3G mobile phones to communicate with your friends in a wide area wireless environment and share data wirelessly. Furthermore, high data speeds of up to 14Mbps per second for downlink and 5.8Mbps for uplink means that you can have transfer of speech and data simultaneously allowing for advanced uses of this technology in many ways by mobile operators.

Although 3G technology is considered a success in many ways, it still remains to be affordable due to the high input fees for service licenses in some jurisdictions. Furthermore, the cost of 3G mobile phones is still considered to be on the high end and it may be some time before a large proportion of mobile users can afford to use these technologies. The evolution towards 4G however which is currently being worked on may see 3G mobile phones and services come down.