This piece was excerpted from a speech presented at CeBIT `98.
Last year the cellular-terminal market reached around 100 million units. The figure is expected to grow significantly this year, and will be larger than the combined sales of personal computers and passenger cars, currently estimated to be around 80 million and 34 million units, respectively.
The shift from analog to digital second-generation standards is taking place at an accelerated rate. In addition to business use, cellular phones increasingly are used as a means to maintain social contacts and to run various everyday errands more easily. People are becoming more and more accustomed to a wireless world.
The volume growth, along with the advanced services provided by digital standards, has made mobile communications an important vehicle on the road to the information society. From the technical side, this is supported by the highly advanced low-power integrated circuits developed specifically for mobile phones. Today’s tiny cellular phones have processing powers approaching 100 MIPS, which is a good number for an ordinary desktop PC. This processing power is increasing to a few hundred MIPS within the next few years. One can thus expect the cellular terminal to become the portable platform for a multitude of new advanced services in the area of business and personal communication, information management and even entertainment.
The information society is often characterized by the terms, anywhere, anytime, anything. In technical terms, this can mean a wide-area coverage wireless data communication service supporting business and “infotainment”applications. From the application point of view, this can mean support for advanced multimedia and Internet connectivity in an attractive and portable terminal.
All this lays an excellent ground for the third generation. The third generation will be launched in 2001 in Japan with advanced European and Asian operators soon following. This gives us wide area coverage with data rates up to 384 kilobits per second and as a more local service, data rates up to 2 Mbps. Wide-area coverage with a high data rate is a unique feature of the third generation and will be one of the fundamental technological components of the information society.
The third generation is definitely taking us toward the wireless information society. With WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) technology offering a flexible and future proof solution for third-generation systems, the prospects are enormous. However, the launch of a new cellular standard always takes several years. Here the industry can make the transition smoother by starting to provide wireless data services based on the second-generation capabilities and by providing multimode second/third generation terminals.
With the developments I have just described, third generation will be well received, in fact, so well that one might say the impact will be explosive. It is therefore appropriate to speak of nothing less than a Big Bang taking us to the wireless information society. After all, nobody likes to be wired.
Dr. Yrjo Neuvo
Senior Vice President
Nokia Mobile Phones
