SCENES of acute embarrassment marked the attempt to launch Europe鈥檚 first commercial third-generation cellphone service in Helsinki this month. A demonstration for journalists who flew in for the occasion showed only that the 3G system does not yet work reliably alongside today鈥檚 digital cellphone networks.
The 3G system is designed to deliver video and music online. But at the presentation, Nokia, the world鈥檚 largest cellphone maker, and Finnish telecoms company Sonera were reduced to showing poor-quality video sequences 鈥� around 10 pictures a second with 128 脳 96 pixel resolution 鈥� which had been sent earlier by ordinary cellphones.
When the 鈥渓aunch鈥� limped to a halt, the puzzled press were dispatched across the road to a public cinema, where they watched Bend it like Beckham. 鈥淲e shall not launch until everything is ready and working properly,鈥� announced Anssi Vanjoki, a Nokia vice-president. 鈥淐onsumers are not forgiving,鈥� he added.
Advertisement
But the debacle is neither Nokia鈥檚 nor Sonera鈥檚 fault. It is the result of Europe鈥檚 decision to use the Universal Mobile Telephone System (UMTS) standard for 3G phones. This uses different frequencies from today鈥檚 GSM and GPRS cellphones and different digital transmission technology.
GSM transmitters put calls on separate carrier waves and the GPRS system works faster by letting several callers share a pool of GSM carriers. UMTS uses the entirely different 鈥渟pread spectrum鈥� technology. This places speech and video or music data in labelled packets, distributed thinly over the full width of a 5-megahertz channel.
To wean the public onto 3G, manufacturers need to maintain compatibility with the old system. So they have tried to develop microchips that automatically switch to the best service available: GSM/GPRS or UMTS. Nokia and Sonera say the Helsinki launch stalled because UMTS cannot yet achieve 鈥渉andover鈥�, the crucial ability to seamlessly transfer a high-speed UMTS call from a phone moving out of range of a UMTS base station to a closer GSM/GPRS one. Instead of switching to the GSM/GPRS link, it often gets cut off.
Another problem is that UMTS phones are supposed to communicate with several base stations at once, always talking to the strongest in the area. But the UMTS technology still won鈥檛 let the phone switch seamlessly from one group to another.
UMTS is so unreliable that it won鈥檛 work even if its data speed is held down to 64 kilobits per second 鈥� a far cry from the 2 megabits per second envisaged when more than 100 cellphone networks around the world paid out a total of $100 billion for UMTS licences. 鈥淭here is no way in practice higher data rates could be guaranteed,鈥� says Vanjoki.
It could take five years to get UMTS working properly, says Bob Shukai, Motorola鈥檚 3G director. And Jeffrey Belk of Qualcomm, which holds key patents used in UMTS, says European networks must now wrestle the bugs out of the system. 鈥淭hey are past the point when they can get by with a PowerPoint presentation.鈥�