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Third Generation Cellular Unleashes Wireless Information Society
March 20, 1998
This speech was given by Dr. Yrjö Neuvo, Senior Vice President, Nokia Mobile Phones, and member of the Nokia Group Executive Board, on 19 March 1998 at a reception organized in conjunction with the CeBIT '98 exhibition in Hannover, Germany. The reception was hosted by the world's leading mobile operators and manufacturers that are cooperatively supporting the W-CDMA system experiments NTT DoCoMo has proposed.
Last year the cellular terminal market was around 100 million units. This figure is expected to grow significantly this year, and will be larger than the combined sales of personal computers and passenger cars estimated to be around 80 million and 34 million units, respectively. The shift from analog to digita second generation standards is taking place at an accelerated speed. In addition to business use, cellular phones are increasingly used as means to maintain social contacts and to run various everyday errands more easily. People, young and elderly alike, become more and more accustomed to a wireless world. The great success of the simple data service, the SMS, as a replacement of post cards for instance around the Holiday Season and even Valentine's Day, is an omen of the direction mankind is moving towards.
Currently the number of cellular subscribers around the world is slightly over 200 million. In Finland cellular penetration has already reached 44%, and with a fast growth around the globe, the moment when landline penetration is exceeded in some markets starts to be in the foreseeable future.
The volume growth along with the advanced services provided by the digital standards has made mobile communications an important vehicle on the road to the Information Society. From the technical side this is supported by the highly advanced low power integrated circuits developed specifically for mobile phones. Today’s tiny cellular phones have processing powers approaching 100 MIPS which is a good number for an ordinary desktop PC. This processing power is increasing to a few hundred MIPS within the next few years. One can thus expect the cellular terminal to become the portable platform for a multitude of new advanced services in the area of business and personal communication, information management and even entertainment.
The Information Society is often characterized by the terms anywhere, anytime, anything. In technical terms this can mean wide area coverage wireless data communications supporting business and infotainment applications. From the applications point of view this means support for advanced multimedia and Internet connectivity in an attractive and affordable portable terminal.
All this lays an excellent ground for the third generation. The third generation will be launched in 2001 in Japan with advanced European and Asian operators soon following. This gives us wide area coverage with data rates up to 384 kbits/s and as a more local service, data rates up to 2 Mbps. Wide area coverage with a high data rate is a unique feature of the third generation and will be one of the fundamental technological components of the information society.
Data rates above 100 kbps open up a new set of applications for business and personal use. Today video conferencing is becoming an attractive means to eliminate travel and save time. We start to appreciate seeing the other end's face on the screen during a conversation. The next step is video telephony also supporting shared colorful presentation graphics, photographs, drawings or just business data at both ends. Similarly, image and video communication will make person to person private communication more human and less technical in spite of the high technology involved. The role of the Internet as a source of information and a means of communicating will be unquestionable and will be an integral part of the Third Generation. Technology becomes even less visible when we start to search for information by using voice browsing and other highly advanced communication methods between man and a machine.
The third generation is definitely taking us towards the Wireless Information Society. With the WB-CDMA technology offering a flexible and future proof solution for third generation systems, the prospects are enormous. However, the launch of a new cellular standard always takes several years. Here the industry can make the transition smoother by starting to provide wireless data services based on the second generation capabilities and by providing multimode second/third generation terminals.
Third generation will be a multifaceted technological challenge. For the price of a single paper clip we can, around the year 2001, get about 10.000 transistors, the workhorses of portable electronics, packed inside an integrated circuit. However, this alone is far from being enough to achieve high data rates, small power consumption, small size and the expected ease of use. Major advances are required in a number of disciplines meaning that the technology race will continue with no signs of leveling off.
With the developments I have just described, third generation will be well received, in fact so well that one might say that, combined with other developments within the information technology, the impact will be explosive. It is therefore appropriate to speak of nothing less than a Big Bang taking us to the Wireless Information Society. After all - nobody loves to be wired.
Headquartered in Finland, Nokia is a broad-scope telecommunications company supplying mobile phones, mobile and fixed telecommunications networks, data communications solutions, multimedia terminals and PC monitors. With sales in 130 countries, net sales totaled FIM 52.6 billion ($9.8 billion) in 1997. Nokia employs more than 36,000 people worldwide.
Further information:
Nokia Mobile Phones, Communications
tel. +358 10 5051
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