I often see comments, mostly coming from folks who live in the US, where EDGE is the standard and 3G - UMTS, HSDPA - is still very young, that you don’t need 3G if you have Wi-Fi.
This, I assure you, is very far from the truth. Even if you constantly move in an environment where free, open Wi-Fi is always present - which is rare - 3G just works better. UMTS signal penetrates natural obstacles better; it’s not sensitive to movoment as much as Wi-Fi, and you don’t have to worry about getting too far from an access point and losing connection. Furthermore, if your mobile device supports UMTS and it is enabled, and you have some kind of data plan set up with your mobile service provider, you don’t have to enter any data to access the Internet: no IPs, no gateways, no nothing. UMTS, as well as HSDPA, just works.
Of course, Wi-Fi has its own benefits; most importantly, the connection is usually way faster than UMTS or even HSDPA. However, most of the time you actually need Internet connection on your cell phone or other mobile device is when you don’t have a known Wi-Fi access point handy; you also usually need it to check your email or browse the net, not to download a lot of data. This is where 3G or even EDGE shines.
So, if we’re talking about the iPhone, or any other mobile device, and the Internet experience on it, don’t understimate 3G; in most cases, it’s a way better solution than Wi-Fi.
3G and Wi-Fi are indeed very different. However, there is research underway to hybridize these two distinct technologies to exploit the pros of both and side-step the cons. I’ve just written about this at Sciencetext.com
http://www.sciencetext.com/connecting-3g-devices-to-wi-fi.html
db
@David: thanks, seems like an interesting read..
Hope so. I didn’t have the “space” to do justice to the many papers in the special issue, hopefully keen readers will be able to get hold of the abstracts from the link and investigate further.
db
yes, we use 3g here in mexico since it started and we now got 3g speeds up to 3mb download and 1mb of upload and that is well more than enough for phone or laptop.
an interesting read indeed!
Stan and David, both of your articles are interesting. They have clarified a lot of things about Wi-Fi. The latest trends in the Wi-Fi domain looks exciting. And the utopia that David suggests isn’t faraway.
Vanessa@ Future of Engineering Blog