OXFORD, United Kingdom—A U.K.-based company is claiming that most 2.5-generation (2.5G) applications will be almost impossible to run, given that more than 40 percent of packets can become lost on General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) networks. The firm said that independent trials indicate that the new GPRS infrastructure is not performing at anywhere near its stated efficiency.
The company, Flyingspark, a mobile software developer, said that while GPRS coverage is now almost universal in Europe and the Nordic countries, the latency for packet transmissions could be up to five seconds. The firm maintains that many TCP-based applications could not manage with these conditions, with the protocol timing out long before the potential five-second wait.
GPRS infrastructure developers have responded to this claim by stating that a five-second latency is most unusual, and performance improvements in 2.5G handsets and base station software would mean that users should not experience any problems running TCP-IP-based applications.
