Introduction

Marty Cooper, the Chief Executive of ArrayComm (which is well known in inventing the mobile phone while working at Motorola) claims that there are problems with UMTS. At a Broadband DSL Converence in Berlin, he said, "We engineers knew years ago that 3G as presently constituted is essentially dead". He further explained with the following issue.

UMTS Bandwidth Challenges

When UMTS was developed initially and put for sale, it was mentioned that a bandwidth of 2 Mbps would be available. Apart from this figure, the actual support is 1.1 Mbps channel. The fact adds fuel to the fire when you come to know that this 1.1 Mbps channel MUST be shared by people to be economic. So, in actual, a user will get about 80kbps. The current GSM network can easily support around 50-60 kbps which is close to the one currently provided by the UMTS. This fact creates a bad impression. Furthermore, there is a possibility that subscribers wont pay a lot for this slight increase in bandwidth. Cooper's statement was responded by Karl Heinz Rosenbrock, the head of the European standards body ETSI (which is in charge of the UMTS specifications on which some 3G networks are based) who was in the audience. Rosenbrock didnt dispute to the figures provided by Cooper but he quoted the fact that UMTS would evolve/improve with time. Furthermore, most of the networks started live services in a trial status.

Conclusion

In my opinion, this is not a big issue. Its just the early days of UMTS and UMTS has the flexibility to evolve and to improve. Remember GSM also started with almost nothing as bandwidth. You can see evolution path of GSM from GSM to GPRS and then EDGE. Further evolution of GSM has almost stopped and its only UMTS that can takeover the responsibility of future requirements. Dont think that whether UMTS will come into existence or not, its already there. Dont think that UMTS is dead, think that for how long the world could survive without it !