Where we go..??

I thought to put some comments under this topic, since I have seen a post on one of my friend’s blog in same topic and also during last 2-3 weeks I had to go through some next generation web technology news sites. I believe this topic is quite curious and still covered and unclear to most of users of the internet and mobile technologies.

1G -> 2G -> 3G -> 4G.. What next in 5G???

Nowadays 4G (which is expected to be finalized between approximately 2011 and 2013) is a HOT topic in Sri Lanka and as I can see telco operators doing a big marketing war top on that. 


Here I’m not going to explain what is the 4G or 5G, but if we are talking about briefly on that; fourth and fifth generation wireless mobile systems are commonly known as 4G and 5G. They are expected to provide global roaming across different types of wireless and mobile networks, for instance from satellite to mobile networks and to Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). 4G is an all IP-based mobile network using different radio access technologies providing seamless roaming and connection via always the best available network (Multihome).

The fifth generation communication system is envisioned as the real wireless network, capable of supporting Wireless World Wide Web (wwww) applications in 2013 to 2020 time frame. According to the technology specialists, the 5G (or beyond 4G) systems will be capable of supporting wwww allowing a highly flexible network such as a Dynamic Adhoc Wireless Network (DAWN). In this advanced technologies including intelligent antenna and flexible modulation which are keys to optimize the adhoc wireless networks. 5G systems should be an intelligent technology capable of interconnecting the entire world without limits. An example application could be a robot with built-in wireless communication with artificial intelligence.

Technology/Feature	4G	5G
Data bandwidth	the maximum throughput at short distance and low velocity is about 80 Mbit/s, while the peak physical layer net bit rate is 100 Mbit/s.	more than the 1 Gbps
Multiplexing	CDMA	CDMA
Switching	Packet switching	Packet switching

So basically every phone or device will get an IP address and operate on the data network (not like previous circuit switching network). This trend will provide the stage to make strong and huge VoIP network which can do video conferencing and other hi-tech communications like Mobile TV. 
I’m personally believing IT giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo will be the next generation MVNO’s (Here I’m not referring current MVNO technologies, I think MVNO’s next generation is basically geo distributed telco software such as HLR can be in US and centralized IN can be in UK which communicate over the data network) and these giants will be control the mobile world afterwards. So basically what I’m saying is, in the near future people do not dial numbers to make phone calls and they will dial e-mail addresses instead.

Nokia and some of other telco applications and hardware vendors are speaking on Cognitive radio technology which is going to be the RF hardware layer for 5G. In following video you can see the technology introduction.

Above brief is enough to think on what's happening in next decade. So obviously mobile phones also will get upgrades since mobile networks are getting change. Basically we are much more towards to the era of advance smart phones which can do GPS navigations.. Content browsing.. etc. 
These days many people are developing smart phone applications.. and hosting applications to earn money, eventually some of them are making money and some of them are losing out but the youth trend is there always. Hence I can say next decade is the era of content applications J as well.

Do I need to change my mobile phone??

I found above image from the internet and it shows what’s happening around us. You can see these days Android (Google’s open-source operating system) is hitting the market, respectively corresponding phone operating systems such as iPhone OS also sharing the other bigger portion of the market. Since Androd is open source, phone hardware companies like HTC, Motorola and Samsung can get the OS free for their phones. This makes big advantage for them to provide low cost mobile phones than the others. 
HP brought the Palm recently and now they have came up with WebOS as well as Blackberry also has came up with their own tablet device last month (Sony also announced they going to provide tablets), so hopefully within next few years we can see some low cost tablets and high-end smart phones in the market.

That means definitely I have to change my phone, otherwise I could not survive on the growing mobile network (Using Nokia 1100 on 5G network will be a quite rare case).

How about mobile development platforms??

These days biggest trend is Cloud services, some companies says they are providing SAAS some says PAAS, actually some of companies selling bullshit saying cloud services. I know a company who says their applications are SAAS, but here hilarious matter is, that cloud application needs to install separately and manually on each and every individual customer (no cloud concept automation in the installation at all – just imagine Salesforce application platform installing separately for each and every customer.. smiler scenario is happening here). So currently most of the small software development companies uses name of the SAAS (or other cloud services' names) only as business model or to do the sales, these companies do not implement SAAS technically. Hence I do n't think that kind of companies can be a challenge for other bigger software development companies any more.

As I think, Mobile TV, SIP phones and other ordinary contents like news, sports and music will integrate with  mobile platforms using applications. Since networks are so fast and connectivity errors free, downloading and use of these applications will not be a big issue.

Most of the 4G platforms and modern web applications uses Web 2.0 technologies such as web service, JSON and DOM. If you are going through the internet standardizing web sites (you could see business 2.0, telco 2.0 and web 2.0 terms), so nowadays we are spending the version 2.0 age. I guess after 2013 or 2015 version 3.0 will start. According to the web sites related to the web technologies are says Web 3.0 includes TV-quality open video, 3D simulations, augmented reality, human-constructed semantic standards, and pervasive broadband, wireless and sensors. That means most of the mobile application content and web sites will be much more attractive and innovative.

What about PSTN??

In the above paragraphs I talked more about mobile phone technologies, if we think on land lines and Fiber channels next biggest technical milestone is VDSL or VHDSL (Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line). Currently we using ADSL2+ which is recently released and speed is approximately 1.5 Mbps to 1.6 Mbps (telco people says speed is 2.0Mbps). VDSL providing 50Mbps to 100Mbps. According to the telco news sites VDSL2 is providing 1Gbps speed and still under testing and research.

So I think sometimes combination of Web 3.0, VDSL2 and 5G world will be more virtualized.