The mobile phone industry is one of the fastest developing industries in the IT world. It can be dated back to the early 1980s, when analog cellular telephone systems were experiencing rapid growth in Europe. Particularly in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, also in France and Germany. Each of these countries develops its own systems which are incompatible with the others in equipment and operation. Due to these problems faced by the European countries, which was realized early on in 1982, the Conference of European Posts and Telegraphs (CEPT) formed a study group called the Groups Special Mobile (GSM) to study and develop a pan-European public land mobile system. The proposed system has to meet these criteria:
· Good subjective speech quality.
· Low terminal and service cost.
· Support for international roaming.
· Ability to support handheld terminals.
· Support for range of new services and facilities.
· Special efficiency.
· ISDN compatibility.
In 1989, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) took over the study. The Phase I of the GSM specifications was published in 1990 and in the mid-1991, the commercial service was started. By 1993, there were 36GSM networks in 22 European countries and over 200GSM networks in 110 countries around the world. The acronym GSM now aptly stands for Global System for Mobile communications. Before the GSM, there was the AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) which is the analog mobile phone standard developed by Bell Labs. It was officially introduced in the Americas in 1984. The AMPS is a first-generation (1G) cellular technology.
The Interin Standard 95 (IS-95) is the first CDMA-based digital cellular standard pioneered by Qualcomm. cdmaOne is the brand name for this standard. The IS-95 is also known as TIA-EIA-95. It is a second-generation (2G) mobile telecommunication standard that uses Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) which is a multiple access scheme for digital radio, to send voice, data and signaling data (such as a dialed telephone number) between mobile telephone and cell sites. The next generation of mobile technology is the “2.5G” i.e. a technology between the second (2G) and third (3G) generation which started in the late 1990s. It includes the GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and the HSCSD (High-Speed Circuit-Switched Data). The GPRS technology was first integrated into GSM standards releases in 1997, starting with Release 97 and onwards. The HSCSD is an enhancement to Circuit-Switched Data (CSD) (the original data transmission mechanism of the GSM mobile phone system). As with CSD, the channel allocation is done in circuit-switched mode. HSCSD has increased data throughput by the ability to use different coding methods and/or multiple time slots.
EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) is a digital mobile phone technology which acts as a bolt-on enhancement to 2G and 2.5G networks. This technology works in GSM networks and it’s also known as EGPRS which is a superset of GPRS and can function on any network with GPRS deployed on it, provided the carrier implements the necessary upgrades. The EDGE technology was introduced into GSM networks around the world in 2003. The CDMA2000 Evolution is a family of third-generation (3G) mobile telecommunication standards that use CDMA. It is the second generation of the CDMA digital cellular. The different types of CDMA2000 are: CDMA2000 1x, CDMA2000 3x, CDMA2000 1x EV-DO, and CDMA2000 1x EV-DV.
The W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) is a type of 3G cellular network which is the technology behind the 3G UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication System) standard and is allied with the 2G GSM standard with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication System) is one of the third-generation (3G) mobile phone technologies which use the W-CDMA as the underlying standard and it is standardized by the 3GPP.
The High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is a new mobile telephony protocol and is sometimes referred to as a 3.5G (or “3½G”) technology. In this respect it extends W-CDMA in the same way that EV-DO extends CDMA2000. HSDPA provides a smooth evolutionary path for Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS) networks allowing for higher data capacity (up to 14.4Mbit/s in the downlink). It is an evolution of the W-CDMA standard, designed to increase the available data rate by a favor of 5 or more. HSDPA defines a new W-CDMA channel, the High-Speed Downlink Shared Channel (HS-DSCH) that operates in a different way form the existing W-CDMA channels, but is only used for downlink communication to the mobile.
The High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) is a data access protocol for mobile phone networks with extremely high upload speeds up to 5.76Mbit/s. It is considered as a 3.75G mobile technology unlike the HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) which is 3.5G.
