Panelists lament 3G's limited punch

Panelists lament 3G's limited punch
ATLANTA — Despite the wealth of potential applications dreamed up for third-generation wireless services, such service remains an elusive target, according to panelists at an Internet Engineering Consortium forum.

And although sophisticated data services have been highly touted, voice remains the real breadwinner for carriers, panelists said.

"Carriers assume that the killer app is voice," said Chuck Storren, chief technology officer at Coherent Networks Inc. But carriers strong interest in 2.5G service stems from the fact that 2.5G technology can pack more voice channels into a line more efficiently than 3G, Storren said.

The IEC panel, held as part of a program here at the Supercomm trade show, was intended to cover "3G and Beyond," but panelists noted that the industry is having trouble just making use of current technology. "We can't even figure out what's going on in 2.5G today," said Rabih Dabboussi, a consulting engineer at Cisco Systems Inc. "I have a GPRS handset, and I can tell you there's nothing available on this handset but voice."

Reflecting the sentiments expressed at a Tuesday IEC panel on the next-generation Internet, panelists said carriers have yet to determine how to make a profit with 3G services.

"If those carriers that have bought those licenses don't figure out a way to make money off [3G], it's going to die," said Jim Bound, a technical director with Compaq Computer Corp.

But carriers aren't wanting for motive. "Carriers are interested in not only new sources of revenues but new sources of margins — and voice margins are getting squeezed," Storren said.

Application possibilities abound for 3G. Sandeep Mukerjee, director of mobile Internet product management at Lucent Technologies Inc., gave a detailed scenario where movie tickets could be ordered online and friends' calendars updated to reflect the screening time.

Those kinds of applications are going to require a more "aware" network, one that knows who is logged on and through what kind of device, Storren said. One example he gave was of a pilot project involving Coherent Networks, where a mobile device would call for a taxi and give the driver directions to the passenger's destination. That's kind of communication requires new sophistication deep in the network, he said.

"The signaling has to have another layer on top, one that can look at the signaling and see what is going on in the network, see whether the traffic is in real-time and whether the services are in real-time," Storren said. "Right now, voice is the only service the network can be aware of."

Storren predicted an "aware" mobile network will be ubiquitous by 2010, and will take that long primarily due to current delays in 3G rollouts.

Even if such applications take off, 3G faces some technical hurdles. Compaq's Bound hammered on the necessity for Internet Protocol version 6 to be in place, primarily because IPv4 can't absorb the volume of IP addresses expected to arise as more devices are connected to the Net.

Panelists disagreed on the likely dynamic between 3G and 802.11 wireless LANs. Because 802.11 is seeing faster development than 3G, Cisco's Dabboussi believed that could dampen 3G's future impact. Mukerjee and Bunch disagreed, noting that 3G is better suited for voice traffic. "While we talk about next-generation services and while I agree the inflection point [for 3G adoption] is data [services], you cannot get by without voice," Mukerjee said.

Dabboussi noted, however, that voice could become just another data component, depending on how the network and 802.11 devices evolve. "I'm pretty sure you can do good packetized voice on [802.11's] 11 Mbits/second compared with [3G's] 384 kbits/second [3G]," he said.