Since it seems that UMTS is going to be a golden boy on the new and upcoming mobile devices / gadgets, let’s talk a little bit about this technology. UMTS or Universal Mobile Telecommunications System is one of the 3G mobile phone technologies. Using the W-CDMA as the underlying standard, UMTS represents the European/Japanese answer to the ITU IMT-2000 requirements for 3G Cellular radio systems. This technology is sometimes marketed as 3GSM, to show that it’s a combination of the 3G nature of the technology and the GSM standard which it was designed to succeed.

IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) have wrote a simple description about UMTS and said that UMTS is broadband, packet-based transmission of text, digitized voice, video, and multimedia at data rates up to and possibly higher than 2 megabits per second, offering a set of services to mobile computer and phone users no matter where they are located in the world.

UMTS supports up to 1920 kbit/s data transfer rates (and not 2 Mbit/s as frequently seen), although at the moment users in the real networks can expect performance up to 384 kbit/s - in Japan upgrades to 3 Mbit/s are in preparation. However, this is still much greater than the 14.4 kbit/s of a single GSM error-corrected circuit switched data channel or multiple 14.4 kbit/s channels in HSCSD, and - in competition to other network technologies such as CDMA-2000, PHS or wLAN - offers access to the World Wide Web and other data services on mobile devices.

Some (upcoming) devices / gadgets that already support UMTS:

• Fujitsu-Siemens Q2010 Laptop
• LG-U900 Cell Phone
• Pantech U-1100 Cell Phone

More about UMTS:

• Wikipedia
• IAB
• UMTS-Forum
• UMTSWorld