India aims to leapfrog to fourth-generation wireless technology, skipping 3G technology as it has not been found to be cost effective, according to Dayanidhi Maran, the country’s new minister for IT and communications.

India’s mobile telephony service providers are currently providing services based on Global System for Mobile Communications, General Packet Radio Service, or Code Division Multiple Access technologies.

“The 3G standard has been evolved, but has not proved cost-effective,” says Maran. “I therefore plan to leapfrog this generation and develop 4G technology. India has an opportunity with its large market and high technical skills to be a significant player in this field. We are going to set up a National Center for Excellence in this area.”

Technology for Everyone

The new coalition government, led by the Congress Party, took charge this week following the defeat of a coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party whose economic reforms did not percolate to the country’s rural masses. Maran’s agenda hence reflects a stronger focus on taking the benefits of technology to India’s masses.

“I believe that for communication and IT facilities to be truly relevant in India, they will have to touch the lives of villagers,” says Maran. “There are still about 50,000 villages in India which do not have telephone facilities. I would like to see that they are all connected, preferably during the current year.”

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Once every two or three years, a new company appears and makes extraordinary claims about fundamentally new technology. Often, these prove to be more hype than substance; sometimes, however, an idea has the potential to change the game. 

This years’ contender is xG Technology, a Florida company with a wireless data system called xMax. This will outperform any existing radio technology, says the company, providing bandwidth and range that substantially outclass 3G, 802.11x and ultrawideband while using far less power and causing far less interference.  Although we’ll have to wait for three more months before the company goes properly public, Whiteley and Bobier discussed the basic idea behind xMax and lent some credence to the possibility that it may indeed work as advertised.

xMax’s basic advance lies in improving the link between transmitter and receiver, and to understand that it’s important to return to the basics of wireless. One of the things that everyone knows about radio technology is that if you increase the power of the transmitter, you get more range. Greater range also equates to greater bandwidth — if you’re listening to a weak station on FM the signal is mono, noisy and unsatisfactory. A much stronger signal comes over as high quality stereo with little or no noise. Likewise, as you walk away from a Wi-Fi hotspot, you don’t lose connectivity instantly — you get a slower, more uneven connection first.

Like most things that everyone knows, this is wrong. Or rather, it disguises the true physics of radio. The amount of data you can get through a channel doesn’t depend on the power as such: it actually depends on the amount of signal compared to the amount of noise. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is the absolute mathematical limit to data transfer rates. Push more signal through the channel by upping the power — or having a more focussed antenna, or widening the bandwidth — and you can send more data. Reducing the noise will also increase the amount of data that can be sent, without having to boost the signal in any way. “We have nine patents,” said Whitelely, “The demodulator is the key technology. All radio systems have to have gain. All others are brute force, we’re finesse.”

There are two main sorts of noise which exercise the minds of radio engineers. The first is thermal noise, which is caused by electrons moving about randomly in antennas and electronic components inside the receiver. This is what you see if you unplug the antenna from your television: each speckle on the screen is caused by the coincidental judder of a small group of electrons. The hotter the system, the more the electrons move and the higher the noise level — which is why radio astronomers dunk their receivers in liquid nitrogen and other cryogenic coolants. In general, though, there’s not much you can do about thermal noise beyond designing with low-noise components.

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The fourth generation of mobile services - 4G - will be a combination of 3G and WiMax technologies, analyst Forrester has predicted.

According to Bernt Østergaard, vice president and research director at Forrester, 3G will not become the unifying technology umbrella it was originally planned to be, while wireless local area networks (Lans) have crept up on the world.

He predicted that 4G will offer access at Ethernet speeds (such as 10Mbps) and integrated wireless local and wide area networking (Wan) by combining 3G and WiMax in a single handset.

WiMax - or 802.16 - potentially offers wireless broadband services with a range of up to 30 miles, with speeds likely to be around 10Mbps.

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Despite frequent political tension between the Asian neighbors, officials of the two governments will meet in Tokyo on Friday to launch the project for the next-generation phone, said the official of Japan’s Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry.

“During the meeting, we plan to sign a basic agreement to cooperate in research and development in order to secure a global standard by taking advantage of our strengths,” the official said.

Similar governmental meetings will be held regularly and the two nations will set up a forum of industrialists, academics and officials, he said.

Fourth-generation cellular phones, expected to come into practical use around 2010, will be able to transmit data as quickly as optical fiber, dramatically improving the streaming of high-quality images.

Japan has been at the forefront of third-generation (3G) telephones, which allow Internet service, online banking and other advanced features. Most of the world has been slower to catch on amid concern about the high price of 3G.

Japan’s biggest mobile provider NTT DoCoMo, which introduced 3G in 2001, plans to abolish earlier-generation phones altogether by 2012.

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4G takes on a number of equally true definitions, depending on who you are talking to. In simplest terms, 4G is the next generation of wireless networks that will replace 3G networks sometimes in future. In another context, 4G is simply an initiative by academic R&D labs to move beyond the limitations and problems of 3G which is having trouble getting deployed and meeting its promised performance and throughput. In reality, as of first half of 2002, 4G is a conceptual framework for or a discussion point to address future needs of a universal high speed wireless network that will interface with wireline backbone network seamlessly. 4G is also represents the hope and ideas of a group of researchers in Motorola, Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson, Sun, HP, NTT DoCoMo and other infrastructure vendors who must respond to the needs of MMS, multimedia and video applications if 3G never materializes in its full glory.  

Motivation for 4G Research Before 3G Has Not Been Deployed?

• 3G performance may not be sufficient to meet needs of future high-performance applications like multi-media, full-motion video, wireless teleconferencing. We need a network technology that extends 3G capacity  by an order of magnitude. 

• There are multiple standards for 3G making it difficult to roam and interoperate across networks. we need global mobility and service portability

• 3G is based on primarily a wide-area concept. We need hybrid networks that utilize both wireless LAN (hot spot) concept and cell or base-station wide area network design. 

• We need wider bandwidth

• Researchers have come up with spectrally more efficient modulation schemes that can not be retrofitted into 3G infrastructure

• We need all digital packet network that utilizes IP in its fullest form with converged voice and data capability.

Comparing Key Parameters of 4G with 3G

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Sprint Nextel plans to make its long-awaited decision on a 4G (fourth-generation) mobile communications technology by the end of August and start deploying the system in 2008, Chief Operating Officer Len Lauer said Friday at the CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas.

The company holds licenses for radio spectrum in the 2.5GHz band that covers about 85 percent of the U.S. population and has publicly explored both WiMax and Flash-OFDM as technologies to supplement its current 3G network with a higher speed mobile data service. Flash-OFDM, pioneered by Flarion, now a unit of Qualcomm Inc., stands for Fast Low-latency Access with Seamless Hand-off

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Access.

Sprint aims to choose a technology “this summer,” Lauer said on the panel. The decision could come in June, July or August, he said in an interview after the event.

The industry needs to keep moving forward even though current 3G technologies, such as Sprint’s EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) network, are doing a good job today, Lauer said during a keynote panel on the last day of the show. With the coming growth of applications such as streaming video, mobile operators eventually will run out of bandwidth, he said.

Lauer hopes mobile operators around the world can settle on one 4G technology. That would make it easier for consumer electronics makers to develop products and achieve low prices through economies of scale, he said.

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“THE future always comes too fast,” Alvin Toffler, an eminent futurologist, once said, “and in the wrong order”. The state of wireless telecoms is a classic example. Even as “third-generation” (3G) mobile networks are being switched on around the world, a couple of years later than planned, attention is shifting to what comes next: a group of newer technologies that are, inevitably, being called 4G. More hubris from the technology-obsessed industry? Not exactly. Some 4G networks are operating already, with more on the way. A technology once expected to appear around 2005 is here now.

Interest in 4G owes much to the mess surrounding 3G. Operators spent euro100 billion (about $100 billion) buying licences to run 3G networks, only to find that the technology that most had agreed to use was harder to implement than expected. Even where 3G networks are up and running, demand for the snazzy video and multimedia services they make possible is still uncertain. Expectations are being scaled down: 3G could end up merely as a way for mobile operators to boost their capacity for voice calls in overloaded parts of their networks, rather than a goldmine of new revenues from multimedia services. Last week, mmO2, a European operator, wrote down the value of its 3G investments by nearly $10 billion—although this week, despite reporting a pre-tax loss of $9.6 billion (reflecting write-downs of goodwill related to acquisitions), Vodafone chose to postpone its inevitable 3G reckoning.

As 3G has stumbled, another wireless technology, called Wi-Fi, has inspired a mania unseen since the great internet boom. Wi-Fi provides high-speed internet access to suitably equipped computers within 50 metres or so of a small base-station. It is widely used in homes, offices and universities. Several firms offer fee-based Wi-Fi access in airports, coffee-shops and other public places known as “hotspots”. But because of the short range of Wi-Fi technology, universal coverage is impractical. Although a dozen or so start-ups are working on ways to extend the range of Wi-Fi, it now takes hundreds of Wi-Fi base-stations to cover the same area as a single mobile-phone base-station.

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Just when the third generation of wireless services was getting its sea legs, a new gaggle of technologies came barging into the wireless party.

Whether it’s Flash-OFDM, UMTS TDD, WiMAX or some other impressive-sounding acronym or buzzword, experts promise that such “4G” wonders will finally bring broadband mobility to the general public.

“There are a lot of exciting possibilities out there,” said Max Weise, a principal at Adventis, a global consulting firm. “You could have your personal media repository that you use at home and on the road. Or handheld devices could control things at home, such as your TiVo.”

The public has heard it all before, but indications are that the next couple of years will bring significant innovation as new software-based “system-on-a-chip” architectures combine with more efficient 4G networks now in the works.

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The article discusses 4th generation. 4G mobile, aims to provide an effective solution for the next generation mobile services. Progressing from previous three generations, 4G mobile systems have been significantly improving in terms of interactive multimedia services:

The first radiotelephone service was introduced in the US at the end of the 1940s, and was meant to connect mobile users in cars to the public fixed network. In the 1960s, a new system launched by Bell Systems, called Improved Mobile Telephone Service” (IMTS), brought many improvements like direct dialing and higher bandwidth. The first analog cellular systems were based on IMTS and developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The systems were “cellular” because coverage areas were split into smaller areas or “cells”, each of which is served by a low power transmitter and receiver.

First generation:-
1G analog system for mobile communications saw two key improvements during the 1970s: the invention of the microprocessor and the digitization of the control link between the mobilephone and the cell site. AMPS ( Advance mobile phone system ) was first launched by US which is 1G mobile system. It is best on FDMA technology which allows users to make voice calls within one country.

Second generation:-

2G digital cellular systems were first developed at the end of the 1980s. These systems digitized not only the control link but also the voice signal. The new system provided better quality and higher capacity at lower cost to consumers. GSM (Global system for mobile communication) was the first commercially operated digital cellular system which is based on TDMA.

Third generation:-

3G systems promise faster communications services, including voice, fax and Internet, anytime and anywhere with seamless global roaming. ITU’s IMT-2000 global standard for 3G has opened the way to enabling innovative applications and services (e.g. multimedia entertainment, infotainment and location-based services, among others). The first 3G network was deployed in Japan in 2001. 2.5G networks, such as GPRS (Global Packet Radio Service) are already available in some parts of Europe.
3G technology supports 144 Kbps bandwidth, with high speed movement (e.g. vehicles), 384 Kbps (e.g. on campus) & 2 Mbps for stationary (e.g.inbuilding )

Fourth generation:-

At present the download speed for mode data is limited to 9.6 kbit/sec which is about 6 times slower than an ISDN (Integrated services digital network) fixed line connection. Recently, with 504i handsets the download data rate was increased 3-fold to 28.8kbps. However, in actual use the data rates are usually slower, especially in crowded areas, or when the network is “congested”. For third generation mobile (3G, FOMA) data rates are 384 kbps (download) maximum, typically around 200kbps, and 64kbps upload since spring 2001. Fourth generation (4G) mobile communications will have higher data transmission rates than 3G. 4G mobile data transmission rates are planned to be up to 20 megabits per second.

Before understanding 4G, we must know what is 3G ? 3G initiative came from device manufactures, not from operators. In 1996 the development was initiated by Nippon Telephone & Telegraph (NTT) and Ericsson; in 1997 the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) in the USA chose CDMA as a technology for 3G; in 1998 the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) did the same thing; and finally, in 1998 wideband CDMA (W-CDMA) and cdma2000 were adopted for the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS).

W-CDMA and CDMA 2000 are two major proposals for 3G. In this CDMA the information bearing signal is multiplied with another faster ate, wider bandwidth digital signal that may carry a unique orthogonal code. W-CDMA uses dedicated time division multiplexing (TDM) whereby channel estimation information is collected from another signal stream. CDMA 2000 uses common code division multiplexing (CDM) whereby channel estimation information can be collected with the signal stream.

Access Technologies (FDMA, TDMA, CDMA) -
FDMA: Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) is the most common analog system. It is a technique whereby spectrum is divided up into frequencies and then assigned to users. With FDMA, only one subscriber at any given time is assigned to a channel. The channel therefore is closed to other conversations until the initial call is finished, or until it is handed-off to a different channel. A “full-duplex” FDMA transmission requires two channels, one for transmitting and the other for receiving. FDMA has been used for first generation analog systems.

TDMA: Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) improves spectrum capacity by splitting each frequency into time slots. TDMA allows each user to access the entire radio frequency channel for the short period of a call. Other users share this same frequency channel at different time slots. The base station continually switches from user to user on the channel. TDMA is the dominant technology for the second generation mobile cellular networks.

CDMA: Code Division Multiple Access is based on “spread” spectrum technology. Since it is suitable for encrypted transmissions, it has long been used for military purposes. CDMA increases spectrum capacity by allowing all users to occupy all channels at the same time. Transmissions are spread over the whole radio band, and each voice or data call are assigned a unique code to differentiate from the other calls carried over the same spectrum. CDMA allows for a ” soft hand-off” , which means that terminals can communicate with several base stations at the same time.

Beyond 3G

In the field of mobile communication services, the 4G mobile services are the advanced version of the 3G mobile communication services. The 4G mobile communication services are expected to provide broadband, large capacity, high speed data transmission, providing users with high quality color video images, 3D graphic animation games, audio services in 5.1 channels. We have been researching the vision of 4G mobile communication systems, services, and architectures. We also have been developing the terminal protocol technology for high capacity, high speed packet services, public software platform technology that enables downloading application programs, multimode radio access platform technology, and high quality media coding technology over mobile networks.

Reasons To Have 4G -
1.Support interactive multimedia services: teleconferencing, wireless Internet, etc.
2.Wider bandwidths, higher bit rates.
3.Global mobility and service portability.
4.Low cost.
5.Scalability of mobile networks.