2
UMTS Services
2.1 Introduction
This chapter will elaborate on UMTS services from the user's perspective. Successful practitioners of UMTS and WCDMA/HSPA technology need to understand the value of services to consumers and businesses, as well as the business models and value proposition options that operators have. The approach will be rather non-technical. Indeed, we can see that greatest successes in the market place are created when the underlying technology and complexity are hidden from the eventual user of the service. Readers are encouraged to reflect on the impact, requirements and trade-offs that various services have or imply to 3GPP-defined functionalities and network elements delivering the service.
In the early days of UMTS and WCDMA, the promise of the industry was that ‘we will put the internet in every pocket’. It was envisioned that this would be accomplished by ‘delivering up to 2 Mbps data rates’. This was very appealing since typical premium fixed broadband connections enabled similar data rates. Moreover, the improvement over 2G (second generation) cellular systems was very substantial: EDGE networks, for example, delivered tens of kbps or later at best close to 200 kbps data rates. Due to the legacy of the business models of 2G network operators, their market power and control points, the typical view was that operators should tightly control access of their UMTS subscribers to ...
