The wireless Internet is coming of age! Millions of people worldwide already areusing Web phones and wireless handheld devices to access the Internet. Nations andcorporations are making enormous efforts to establish a wireless infrastructure,including declaring new wireless spectrum, building new towers, inventing newhandset devices and high-speed chips, and developing protocols.
The adoption of the wireless Internet strictly depends on the mobile bandwidth,the bandwidth of access technologies. The current 2G wireless access technologiestransmit at 9.6 to 19.2 kbps. These speeds are much slower than the dial-up ratesof desktop PCs connecting to the Internet. However, 2.5G wireless technologiesalready in use provide speeds of 100 kbps, and 3G technologies with speeds of 2to 4 Mbps will allow wireless connections to run much faster than today’s wiredcable and DSL services. Figure 1.1 illustrates the transmission speeds of wirednetworks and their applications. This figure includes wireless access networks,showing that 2G networks are basically used for voice and text messaging, but 2.5Gnetworks and particularly 3G networks will open doors for many new wirelessapplications that use streaming video and multimedia.
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