3G comes of age

摘要

The date when third-generation mobile services would become a commercial reality for the mass market has always been a moveable feast. While 2004 was seen as a breakthrough year for the technology with a series of network launches, 2005 saw more handsets, more subscribers and more services on the market. But 2005 was probably not "the year of 3G." At the end of September there were estimated to be around 35 million WCDMA users and 18 million cdma2000 1X EV-DO users globally-a drop in the ocean of the 2 billion global mobile subscriber base. How many 3G subscribers there actually are on the market also seems to vary according to whom you talk to. Perry LaForge of the CDMA Development Group (CDG), which supports the development of mobile networks based on the CDMA/cdma2000 evolutionary path, says high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), the next evolution of WCDMA, is more comparable to EV-DO networks.