What is 3G?

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We learned, once upon a time, that the smallest element anything consisted of was an atom.  Dogs made be made of 20 bazillion atoms while humans are made up of 2,000 bazillion trillion atoms… or something like that.

In the computer world the smallest piece of data is a bit.  For the sake of this conversation all data is made up of 8 bits… so, the “character” A is made up of 8 bits.  The word “apple” is made up 5 characters each made up of 8 bits.  Characters consist of letters, numbers and special items such as commas, spaces, !, @, etc.

Years ago we’d connect online using a modem and would “dial up” to the Internet.  These modem speeds started around 300 bps… bits per second.  Thus, at 300 bps, the communication speed was around 37 characters per second… about 6 or 7 typical words.

Pictures sizes are measurable in bits as well… thus a picture of 3,000 or 4,000 bits could take several seconds to download.  It was very common to wait a minute or two (if not longer) for each and every web page to load when one was surfing the Internet.

Over time upload and download speeds have increased dramatically.  In fact we changed the wording from dial up to “broadband” or “high speed” to denote an entirely different speed concept altogether as dial up moved from 300 bps to 1,200 then 2,400 and higher.  We now discuss data speed in terms of mega (millions) and giga (billions) of bits per second. 

We began our “G” (G = generation) series with 2G.  2G was the beginning of digital transmissions… thus everything prior to digital is referred to as 1G (analog)  The G series often times implies faster speeds but also includes other benefits… such as encryption.  Thus a 2G phone, for example, could not be “listened” to by normal eavesdropping methods.  2.5G could provide data rates of 56kbps (k = thousand) or 56,000 bits per second to 115 kbps.  2.75G is referred to as the Edge network offering speeds up to 236.8 kbps.

3G is a standard that can offer rates up 384 kpbs or 384,000 bits per second.  3G offers greater security over 2G as well as Mobile TV, Video on demand and Video conferencing capabilities.

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