Emerging Personal Wireless Communications

The growth of telecommunications has been largely based on mobile and data services in the past 10 years and the growth will continue. For instance, it is forecasted that after 2005 the mobile traffic turnover in Europe will exceed that of fixed telephone traffic and the penetration of Internet access through mobile will exceed that of fixed access. It is expected that the new value added services will be Internet-based and the IP traffic will outweigh the amount of traditional ISDN based telephone traffic. The transition from the existing telecommunications services to mobile and Internet based ones will change the service infrastructure as well as the customer and service management structures. In wireless communications there are several new standards being developed and implemented to improve the data transmission rate over radio channels, to combine both voice, packet data and multimedia services in the terminals and to improve the service quality and usability. Narrow band packet radio standards such as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and i-Mode are already operative and broadband IMT-2000 standards, also called as Third Generation (3G) Mobile, have been developed in Japan, Europe and US. At the same time Wireless LAN and Bluetooth technologies mature and provide short-range data access to terminal devices. The emerging new technologies create opportunities not only to incumbent teleoperators but also to new network operators, IT companies and new service and content providers.