Wireless Data Update – Beating the Technology Shell Game
Michael Forbes
LinksPoint One Selleck Street, Suite 330, Norwalk, CT 06855
Abstract
Listening to wireless service providers talk about the service that they and their competitors
offer has become more and more like the old shell game. It’s easy to get lost in a swirl of
acronyms and unqualified statements about data rates and coverage. But with the pressure to
deploy applications that deliver real productivity increases and measurable ROI, it’s critical
that you don’t choose the empty “shell” that will commit your business to the wrong
technology choice.
With confusion reigning around the competing wireless data technologies being brought to
market and the specter of “3G” wireless appears on the horizon, you need unbiased answers to
your questions about technology that promises be crucial to your business. This session is
designed to separate the hype from the reality and provide a baseline working understanding of
the wireless data options available to support mobile applications. This will be achieved by a
clear and concise review of each of the major wireless data technologies including CDPD,
Mobitex, GPRS/EDGE, 1xRTT and the emerging 3G technologies. These technologies will
then be reviewed and compared in terms of data rates, coverage, compatibility and staying
power.
Wireless Technology Update: Beating the wireless shell game
For over 100 years wireless data has intrigued both technologists and business people. In fact,
around the turn of the last century, the inventor Nikola Tesla and financier J.P. Morgan were in
discussions about using the new "wireless" technology to send data like stock quotes and
weather forecasts to remote receivers. For the time it was an amazing application of the
technology, but the project broke down when they couldn't figure out how to bill for it. A lot of
things have changed over the past century, but we still face the same questions that stymied
Tesla and Morgan: how can we leverage the power of sending data through the air and how can
we build a compelling value proposition around it.
Today, we face another complexity that didn’t exist a century ago – choice. Tesla and Morgan
had one choice, which was to build their project from scratch. We have the added dimension of
choosing which flavor from the alphabet soup of wireless data works best for us. Is it CDPD,
GPRS, iDen, 1xRTT or one of the other options available today? Or should you wait for the
brave new 3G world of tomorrow?
The goal of this paper is to de-scramble the acronyms of wireless data and set forth what
choices you have in front of you today. But first, we’ll get started with a brief review of the
evolution of wireless data technology.
A Brief and incomplete history of wireless data
Before there was data there was voice (well, actually data came first if you count wireless
telegraphy, but since this is an incomplete history, we won’t). We’re also going to leave out
proprietary data systems over private radio, pre-cellular voice platforms and all paging
technologies except one.
Our history of wireless starts in 1984 with the introduction of the Advanced Mobile Phone
Systems (AMPS). While no longer “advanced,” it was revolutionary at the time. AMPS
allowed mobile service providers (carriers) to provide a reasonable level of service to a much
larger number of subscribers. At first, AMPS featured vehicle mounted and “bag” phones, but
over time, handheld phones became available. The first ones looked more like slightly-smaller
military walkie-talkies. With all the static, dropped calls and coverage “black holes,” AMPS
introduced America to the power of mobile communication. AMPS set the current wireless
paradigm of a network of interconnected towers (cells) handing calls off from one to the next as
the caller moved. However, AMPS was an analog technology not well suited to wireless data
transmission. Almost nobody ever calls it this, but AMPS was the “1G” or first generation of
cellular technology.
The next big thing in the evolution of cellular was the introduction of digital wireless or
Personal Communication Services. The first commercial “PCS” call in the new 1900 KHz band
was made in 1995 on the American Personal Communication Network (which became Sprint
Spectrum, then Omnipoint, then Voicestream and is now part of T-Mobile). One of the best
things about PCS (other than the digital security that made cellular “cloning” a thing of the
past) was that it was data friendly. It offered Short Message Service (SMS) which allowed
users to receive and (depending on the technology as originally deployed) send short text
messages of 50-160 characters. Despite its success in Europe, there were all sorts of limitations
that kept SMS from consumer success and enterprise viability. (In Europe, SMS is still the
primary technology used to carry “mash notes’ between teens.)
PCS or “2G” cellular also offered circuit-switched wireless data at blazing speeds of up to 9.6
Kbps, but it was expensive and often unreliable.
At the same time, new wireless carriers were rolling out digital services, several of the
incumbent cellular carriers were deploying an upgrade to their analog (AMPS) networks called
Cellular Digital Packet Data, or CDPD. An executive at a wireless carrier once described this
as a technology for “squeezing the data in during the pauses in conversations.” Regardless of
where the data was squeezed in, CDPD provided the first reliable, packet data technology for
cellular networks. CDPD became the workhorse of mobile data for much of the late 90’s and
early 00’s.
