The 3rd Generation - GPRS

July 15, 2000
By Kelvin Chai
 

While everyone is still excited about the so-called "high technology" Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), another mobile revolution has just made its way to the new generation mobile telephony. Beginning mid-2001, the concept of using a mobile phone to connect to the Internet (with a reasonable transfer rate) will no longer be a dream thanks to the new General Packet Radio Services (GPRS).

Although the current technology allows us to connect to the Internet with mobile phones, the transfer rate is still unreasonably slow at only 9.6kbit per second, which is six times slower than the average household modem of 56kbit per second. With a transfer rate of up to 115kbit per second, the GPRS technology has opened a new chapter to the mobile Internet age. This technology will allow users to watch the latest TV programs, listen to the hottest music or even have real time face-to-face conferences with the mobile phone.

Besides having such an amazing transferring rate, another great advantage of the GPRS technology for mobile subscribers lie in the possibility of having continuous connectivity to the Internet, the corporate Intranet or a WAP portal as well as for fast access to new, content-rich services. As it is expected to transfer such a large number of data, GPRS divides these huge data into smaller fragments or packets. This is very convenient if the mobile phone is disconnected from the Internet, and within a certain period of time of disconnection (depending on the ISP), this transfer of data can be resumed. This saves the trouble of having the data transferred all over again.

GPRS may seem to have solved the problem of slow data transfer rate from mobile phone to the Internet. However we are also told that later in this revolutionary development, GPRS will have EDGE and WCDMA 3rd Generation (3G) mobile phones as their stepping-stone. With a transfer rate of up to 384kbit per second as the major selling point, it is set to look like no one will ever catch up unless they change their mobile phone everyday!