2G, 3G, 4G, Kya Jee?. Review on Tips on Mobile Broadband

“4G is the next big thing, ” declared the tech-savvy MBA son of a friend during a dinner get-together recently.  On the other hand here I am, struggling to obtain decent surfing / downloading speeds from my 3G dongle even when I am close to the tower of my service provider.  There seems to be huge gap between what is being advertised and what is reality.  Technical jargon is being wildly thrown at the consumers by the broadband providers, and few know which is which.  The service being touted as “state-of-art” and “3G” by many a mobile broadband provider is neither state-of-art, nor 3G.  It seems that a service provider can apply little tweaking to their existing service and call it “new generation, ” and advertise the tweaked service as 3G or 4G(where the'G' stands for'generation') without actually meeting the standards.

So, let us be clear about what can be called as 3G and 4G.  These terms are technology independent, and their standards are rather about speed.

ITU's IMT-2000 standards require that a 3G service should be able to provide speeds of 2 Mbps in stationary environment, and 384 kbps while fully mobile within the specified coverage area.  GPRS at about 40 kbps of average speed fares far below these standards.  EDGE in its various revisions, with realistic speeds around 100 kbps, fares better than the GPRS, but again falls short of the 3G standards.  Therefore, “3G network based on state-of-art EDGE technology, ” being advertised by some mobile broadband providers in India, is an oxymoron.  Indeed, terms such as 2.5G, 2.75G, 2.9G etc., are sometimes coined to show how close the technology implementation is to the 3G standards, but the fact remains that the service is not 3G.

On the other hand, the EV-DO technology which BSNL and few other service providers have deployed, in its version 2.0, is capable of 3G speeds.

UMTS(and its derivatives like HSDPA, HSPA+, HSPA+, HSPA Evolution), WiMAX and LTE technologies are capable of providing practical speeds in excess of the ITU's IMT-2000 3G standards.  But none of them can, as on date, provide speeds that approach the specifications laid down in the ITU's 4G standards, which are a mind-boggling 1 Gbps in stationary environment, and 100 Mbps while fully mobile within the specified coverage area.  Speeds in realistic environments for LTE, which is being seen as a successor of GSM & CDMA technologies for mobile broadband, were seen to be about 40 Mbps in stationary environment in Norway and Finland where it has been introduced.  Therefore this technology is not yet capable of  providing 4G speeds.  It is all but natural that with the 4G standards remaining the same, these technologies would brand themselves as 3.5G, 3.75G, 3.9G, so on and so forth.

Indeed, unable to up their data speeds, some companies which are eager to advertise their network as'4G', are now lobbying with the ITU to lower the standards for 4G, so that they can be officially reckoned as 4G.  After all, what constitutes the “next generation” in mobile broadband is subjective, and ITU will have the final say!

So, the next time your service provider talks about his 3G services based on “state-of-art EDGE technology, ” tell him not to talk nonsense!

If you have an imperative need for the mobile broadband, always choose a HSPA+ or HSPA+ network if you have one in your area even if it is costly.  Nowadays, laptops and notebooks with built-in modems for the mobile broadband have arrived in the market.  Alternatively, if you want to go the USB dongle way, look for a modem that has an external antenna socket, for, worst comes to worst, you can connect an external antenna to your dongle and improve the signal strength and speed.  Third party modems which are plug-and-play with all kinds of Operating Systems(Windows / Linux / Mac), and which are marketed as "auto APN, " are better.  Sometimes, connecting a USB dongle to one end of a long male-female USB cable and hanging the dongle high like an antenna, and connecting the other end of the USB cable to your laptop, will improve the signal strength.  Innovative folks would actually place the USB dongle at the center of a metal cooking pan(which is then supposed to gather the signal like a dish antenna) to improve the signal strrength.  There are others who would improvise the humble tea-filter-mesh and discarded CDs to work as dish-antennas for their 3G dongle.  You can try these methods to improve the 3G signal strength at your home.

Finally, I wonder what will happen to all those birds and bees(and eventually to humans) with terabytes of data travelling every second through thin air.  As such, there is so much protest against cellphone towers in residential areas.

Any way, regards & best wishes!