Original subtitles

Many of the things we do in our normal

workday involve using our mobile phones.

These are our cell phones

and we call them cell phones because they are using a cellular network.

We call it cellular because we are separating up the geography

of an area into sections or cells,

and we put antennas at the edges of those cells so that we're able

to maintain connectivity wherever we might happen to travel.

Some of the original cellular networks were called 2G networks,

and they consisted of two global standards.

One of these standards was GSM, or the Global System for Mobile

Communications, and the other one is CDMA or code Division Multiple Access.

Both of these standards were very good for voice communication, but they had

very limited support for sending data over these wireless networks.

They were originally circuit switch networks and really

had to be upgraded to allow some type of data connected.

GSM was a big part of that very early cellular

network, GSM being the global system for mobile communications.

GSM was about 90% of the worldwide market.

It was a standard in the European Union, and that allowed you

to have coverage wherever you happen to travel in the world.

In the United States, come in

GSM networks were the AT&T network and T-Mobile network.

This GSM network allowed you to have all of your phone configurations

on a subscriber identity module or a SIM card, and you could move

that card from phone to phone, and your phone number would follow you.

Depending on where that SIM card happened to be.

This GSM standard used multiplexing to be able to have many people

communicating at the same time over the same frequencies.

Every user got a little slice of time and could send the information,

while other people were also conversing on that same network.

This allowed people to perform voice communication, data communication,

and combine all of that across many people in one single geographic area.

CDMA is the code

division multiple access, and as the name implies,

you can have multiple people communicating over this network.

But as they were sending information, they were sending it with a particular

code.

Each call used a different code to be able to communicate,

which meant that the handset that you were using could filter out

codes that weren't important to your conversation, and focused

only on the code specific between you and who you're talking to.

In the United States.

CDMA was commonly used by Verizon and Sprint.

They controlled exactly what handsets you were able to use on those networks,

and unfortunately, CDMA wasn't popular in

other parts of the world or with other providers.

As more people needed additional capabilities on these mobile networks.

We needed newer standards that provided additional features.

One of these newer standards was the third generation, or 3G

technologies that we introduced in 1998.

This allowed us to have much more capabilities

for the data that we were sending from our mobile devices,

and we had additional speeds

so we could send more of that data much faster over these same networks.

Usually we got about several megabits per second of speed

over the best possible 3G connectivity.

With these enhanced speeds, we were able to introduce new capabilities

for our mobile handsets such as GPS, mobile television, streaming

video and streaming audio or video on demand.

It became very

clear that the separation between GSM and CDMA

was creating a number of challenges for users that wanted to move

between different providers or use different networks

that might be available in their area to be able to converge these together.

We introduced LTE.

This is 4G technology in the cellular world,

and LTE stands for long term evolution.

This was a converged standard, so companies that used to be GSM or CDMA

can now use one standard LTE to be able to send data over a wireless network.

It's based on GSM and what we call Edge,

or the enhanced data rates for GSM evolution.

You combine all those together to create this newer LTE standard,

and it increased the throughput up to 150mbps

on the best possible mobile connection.

In some areas, you may find an upgraded version of LTE

called LTE advanced or LTE, where it effectively

doubled the throughput on these LTE networks up to 300mbps.

In 2020, we

introduced a newer generation of mobile communication

called our 5G, or fifth generation cellular networking.

These 5G networks introduce greatly enhanced speeds,

and we will eventually have 5G networks that can perform at around

ten gigabits per second.

These 5G networks greatly enhance the speeds that we can use for data

over these mobile networks, and in the best possible scenario,

we should eventually get to ten gigabit per second throughput from one single

mobile device.

As these networks are rolling out, you may find that you have speeds between

100 and 900mbps, which is still much

faster than the older LTE networks.

If we are able to greatly increase the speeds of the data going over these 5G

networks, then we may be able to extend the functionality of our mobile devices.

This could be especially useful for Internet of Things devices,

where you have many different devices on the network that need to have some type

of connectivity.

If bandwidth

and speeds are suddenly not an issue, you should be able to greatly increase

the capabilities of these IoT or Internet of Things devices.

This would allow us to have much larger file transfers.

We might increase the capabilities of the applications that we're using, or

you may be able to upload much more data into the cloud for additional processing.

Many of the updates for our mobile

devices occur in the operating system of the device itself.

One of these updates is a PRL update.

This is a preferred roaming list that allows your phone to understand where

all of the appropriate towers are for the network that it happens to be using.

This can be updated over the air so you may see that your phone

is performing an OTA update, and if that's occurring,

it may be because a preferred roaming list needs to be changed on your device.

On some mobile phones, you can combine or merge together

the cellular network with an 802.11 network.

This is when you turn your phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot.

This is effectively your own personal data router that's using the cellular network

to communicate to the internet, so you can turn your phone into a hotspot.

And now any other device in your area that communicates over 802.11

can use the internet connectivity that's on your cellular network.

Your phone may support Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities,

but your provider may limit what your phone is able to do.

There may be an additional charge to enable that capability,

and there may be data costs associated

with the information you're sending when you're in this Wi-Fi hotspot mode.

You want to check with your cellular provider

to see what options may be available for your mobile phone.