Advanced Cellular Internet Service (acis) Wireless Data Opportunity Current Wireless Data Systems

he public's desire for mobile communications and computing, as evidenced by the popularity of cellular phones, pagers, and laptop computers, combined with the rapid growth in demand for Internet access, suggest a very promising future for wireless data services. The key to realizing this potential is the development and deployment of high-performance radio systems. While many proposals for third-generation radio systems point to the recent rapid growth in Internet traffic and Web browsing as major motivators, the service definitions generally emphasize new radio technologies with provisions for a broad range of services. An alternative vision, proposed here, is to view third-generation systems as a combination of: • Second-generation systems, which have had great success in providing voice services • The evolution of these systems for voice and low-to modest-bit-rate data • A complementary high-speed packet data service In this article we present a proposal for an Advanced Cellular Internet Service (ACIS), providing reliable, high-speed (1–2 Mb/s) wireless packet access for mobile and portable cellular subscribers. Current cellular radio and paging services have been very successful in providing untethered communications. Wireless access to the public switched telephone network has been growing at rates of 30 to 50 percent a year with the number of cellular subscribers in the United States now exceeding 40 million. The introduction of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and other digital cellular technologies has accelerated the growth of wireless communications in Europe and throughout the world. With the advent of new personal communications services (PCS), wireless access is expected to become even more popular, with predictions of more than 400 million subscribers worldwide by the year 2000. Personal computers and Internet services have experienced even more rapid growth than wireless services due to low-cost high-performance computer technologies and attractive network applications. Interest in wireless Internet access was initially generated by the opportunities for e-mail and messaging, but the recent explosion in popularity of the World Wide Web suggests broader long-term opportunities for wireless data. When you combine the success of cellular and paging services with the increased presence of laptop computers and the rapid growth in the number of Internet users, wireless data should have a very bright future. Nevertheless , today the number of wireless data subscribers is small, with the most formidable obstacle to user acceptance being the performance limitations of existing services and products, including link performance (data rate, latency, and quality); …