Many of the things we do in our normal workday
involve using our mobile phones.
These are our cell phones.
And we call them cell phones because they
are using a cellular network.
We call it cellular because we are separating up
the geography of an area into sections or cells.
And we put antennas at the edges of those cells
so that we're able to maintain connectivity wherever
we might happen to travel.
Some of the original cellular networks
were called 2G networks.
And they consisted of two global standards.
One of these standards was GSM or the Global System
for Mobile Communications.
And the other one is CDMA or Code Division Multiple Access.
Both of these standards were very good
for voice communication, but they had very limited support
for sending data over these wireless networks.
They were originally circuit switched networks and really
had to be upgraded to allow some type of data connectivity.
GSM was a big part of that very early cellular network.
GSM being the Global System for Mobile Communications.
GSM was about 90% of the worldwide market.
It was a standard in the European Union
and allowed you to have coverage wherever you
happen to travel in the world.
In the United States, common GSM networks
were the AT&T network and T-Mobile network.
This GSM network allowed you to have all of your phone
configurations on a subscriber identity module or a SIM card.
And you can move that card from phone to phone,
and your phone number would follow you
depending on where that SIM card happened to be.
This GSM standard used multiplexing
to be able to have many people communicating
at the same time over the same frequencies.
Every user got a little slice of time
and could send the information while other people were also
conversing on that same network.
This allowed people to perform voice communication, data
communication, and combine all of that across many people
in one single geographic area.
CDMA is the Code Division Multiple Access.
And as the name implies, you can have
multiple people communicating over this network.
But as they were sending information,
they were sending it with a particular code.
Each call used a different code to be able to communicate,
which meant that the handset that you were using
could filter out codes that weren't
important to your conversation and focused only
on the code specific between you and who you're talking to.
In the United States, CDMA was commonly
used by Verizon and Sprint.
They controlled exactly what handsets you were
able to use on those networks.
And unfortunately, CDMA wasn't popular in other parts
of the world or with other providers.
As more people needed additional capabilities
on these mobile networks, we needed newer standards that
provided additional features.
One of these newer standards was the third generation
or 3G technologies that we introduced in 1998.
This allowed us to have much more capabilities for the data
that we were sending from our mobile devices.
And we had additional speed so we
could send more of that data much faster
over these same networks.
Usually we got about several megabits per second of speed
over the best possible 3G connectivity.
With these enhanced speeds, we were
able to introduce new capabilities
for our mobile handsets, such as GPS, mobile television,
streaming video and streaming audio, or video on demand.
It became very clear that the separation between GSM and CDMA
was creating a number of challenges for users that
wanted to move between different providers
or use different networks that might
be available in their area.
To be able to converge these together, we introduced LTE.
This is 4G technology in the cellular world.
And LTE stands for Long Term Evolution.
This was a converged standard, so companies
that used to be GSM or CDMA can now
use one standard LTE to be able to send data
over a wireless network.
It's based on GSM and what we call EDGE or the Enhanced Data
Rates for GSM Evolution.
You combine all those together to create this newer LTE
standard.
And it increased the throughput up
to 150 megabits per second on the best possible
mobile connection.
In some areas you may find an upgraded version of LTE
called LTE Advanced or LTE-A, where it effectively
doubled the throughput on these LTE networks
up to 300 megabits per second.
In 2020, we introduced a newer generation
of mobile communication called our 5G or fifth generation
cellular networking.
These 5G networks introduced greatly enhanced speeds.
And we will eventually have 5G networks
that can perform at around 10 gigabits per second.
These 5G networks greatly enhanced the speeds
that we can use for data over these mobile networks.
And in the best possible scenario,
we should eventually get to 10 gigabit per second throughput
from one single mobile device.
As these networks are rolling out,
you may find that you have speeds between 100 and 900
megabits per second, which is still
much faster than the older LTE networks.
If we are able to greatly increase
the speeds of the data going over these 5G networks,
then we may be able to extend the functionality
of our mobile devices.
This could be especially useful for Internet of Things devices
where you have many different devices on the network that
need to have some type of connectivity.
If bandwidth and speeds are suddenly not an issue,
you should be able to greatly increase
the capabilities of these IoT or Internet of Things devices.
This would allow us to have much larger file transfers.
We might increase the capabilities
of the applications that we're using.
Or you may be able to upload much more data into the cloud
for additional processing.
Many of the updates for our mobile devices
occur in the operating system of the device itself.
One of these updates is a PRL update.
This is a Preferred Roaming List that allows your phone
to understand where all of the appropriate towers
are for the network that it happens to be using.
This can be updated over-the-air.
So you may see that your phone is performing an OTA update.
And if that's occurring, it may be because a preferred roaming
list needs to be changed on your device.
On some mobile phones, you can combine or merge together
the cellular network with an 802.11 network.
This is when you turn your phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot.
This is effectively your own personal data router
that's using the cellular network
to communicate to the internet.
So you could turn your phone into a hotspot.
And now any other device in your area
that communicates over 802.11, can
use the internet connectivity that's
on your cellular network.
Your phone may support Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities,
but your provider may limit what your phone is able to do.
There may be an additional charge
to enable that capability.
And there may be data costs associated
with the information you're sending when you're
in this Wi-Fi hotspot mode.
You'll want to check with your cellular provider
to see what options may be available
for your mobile phone.