3G is coming! Arigato UN!
This is hot news, just came out this morning! A follow up to my last post Live TV on your phone posted this week in which I spoke about United Nations discussing the possibility of expanding reserved television bandwidth for mobile service providers for them to provide third-generation services to their subscribers so that they could watch mobile TV on their cell phones and/or hand-held devices among other new options.
Yesterday in a meeting in Geneva, United Nations telecommunications decided to give mobile service providers access to additional bandwidth. In my opinion, this will impact traditional media exponentially, especially television broadcast.
How does this affect my final thesis project? Well, UN just made my project one of the hottest shows on the planet. This seems very surreal, everything is falling in the right place at the right time. In a nutshell, this is a perfect prototype development! I love technology, I love research and I love blogging in my Research Method’s class break! Wi-Fi rules! Once we have WiMAX, I’ll be blogging, vlogging and especially moblogging while in transit!
Here’s the article published this morning by International Herald Tribune in the UK:
BANDWIDTH EXPANDED FOR MOBILE PROVIDERS
The Associated Press
Published November 16, 2007
GENEVA: A United Nations telecommunications meeting decided Thursday to give mobile service providers access to bandwidth now reserved for television broadcasts, a hard-fought compromise that will offer the promise of high-speed Internet access on the move anywhere in the world, but not until 2015 in some places.
The decision, which came at the end of the monthlong meeting of the World Radiocommunications Conference in Geneva, will give makers of wireless equipment more confidence to develop better and less expensive Internet devices.
Delegates met for almost 20 hours straight in a plenary session that began Wednesday evening before reaching the consensus compromise.
The conference meets every three or four years under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union, an arm of the United Nations.
U.S. officials had lobbied hard for a single global agreement on spectrum use, arguing that a common approach was better than each country or region deciding to use separate frequencies for next-generation mobile services.
In the end, European and African countries decided to limit the amount of bandwidth available for mobile services to half of what will be offered in other regions, a move seen as a concession to their national broadcasting companies.
Some regions also opted to wait until 2015 before making the least expensive part of the radio spectrum available to advanced mobile services.
Although U.S. consumers are likely to gain access to these services starting in early 2009, it will take six years more for those in Europe, Africa, China, Russia and much of the Middle East.
European broadcasters had warned that digital terrestrial television reception could be interrupted by nearby cellphones, computers and other devices that shared the frequency.
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