Most of us would be familiar with the term 2G and 3G mobile phones and that the stands for Generation. But, what exactly does this mean and where did all this start? What improvement has this made to the mobile phone we use now? Let us start with where it all started.
In 1910 Lars Magnus Ericsson fitted a telephone into his car and while he was travelling in his car, he would stop at places where the telephone lines were accessible and with a pair of electric wires, he would connect them to the national telephone network. Maybe, this was the birth of mobile telephone, not exactly mobile though. A fully automatic mobile system called MTA was first developed by Ericsson and was commercially released in Sweden in 1956. With a weight of 40 kg, it did not gain much popularity, though it was fully automatic. The upgraded version called MTB was introduced 9 years later with a weight of 9 kg. By the time it was shut down in 1983 it had around 600 customers.
In 1957, a soviet radio engineer called Leonid Kupriyanovich created a portable mobile phone and called it LK-1. This was truly mobile as it weighed only 3kg, a great improvement from its predecessors. It had a small handset with an antenna and a rotary dial. It could operate up to a distance of 20-30 kilometers from the base station and had a battery life of 20 -30 hrs. Each station could serve up to 6 customers. The very next year he had upgraded his radio phone to weigh only 500 grams. At this time people found that the mandatory stay inside the cell area to make a prolonged call was very annoying. To solve this problem Amos E. Joel Jr., a Bell Labs engineer, in 1970, invented the automatic call hand off system which allowed the phones to move through various cell areas without the call getting disrupted or loss of conversation. The first successful public commercial mobile phone network was launched in 1971 in Finland. This is being viewed as the 0G cellular network as it had a slightly better coverage area than previous networks.
In the 1990's 2G phone systems were introduced. These were characterized by the use of digital circuit switched transmission and thus faster phone to network signaling was possible. The frequencies used by both 1G and 2G systems overlapped. This spelled doom for 1G systems and it was rapidly closed down. By this time large brick sized phones gave way to small 100-200g hand-held models and this became the norm till to date. This was made possible through advanced batteries, efficient electronics and higher density of cellular sites. 2G phones introduced a highly popular variant to communication, namely SMS texting. This became the most preferred model of communication and is currently the preferred way for the youth. First downloaded media content was also introduced in 2G phones. Ringtones were downloaded and paid for. Mobile advertising was also introduced when SMS was used for sending advertisements and short headlines of news.
Soon projects began for the development of 3G systems. This process did standardize on the requirements (2 Mbit/s maximum data rate indoors, 384 k/bit/s outdoors, for example), but not on the technology. The first pre-commercial trial 3G Network was launched in Japan, by NTT DoCoMo, in the Tokyo region in may 2001 and the first commercial 3G network too was launched by the same in Japan on October 1, 2001. By the end of 2007 approximately 300 million subscribers on 3G networks existed. The revenue generated by 3G network was over $120 billion during 2007. The things that made this system overwhelmingly successful is the rate of file transfer and downloads from the internet is much faster than the 2G systems. Internet connects twice as fast in 3G system. This has made possible a whole new experience as photos, videos, blogs, etc. can be accessed and enjoyed better. Thus, making 3G systems and services a big hit among mobile phone users, than the 2G systems.