Talkin’ ‘Bout Cell Phone Generations

The call is coming from down the street. Yes, and uh, you know, we're going to cover a topic today that is partially inspired by a little Facebook feedback you and the Facebook feedback actually comes to us courtesy of one of our our listeners who well, he specifically wanted to know about why his phone had magically gone from a three G notification to a four G notification. But that's

really beyond this podcast. We're specifically going to be talking about, uh, the generations of cell phone standards and what's the difference between them, because there's so much confusion there that to address that is more important really than a phone switching from three G three G to four G. And you'll find out specifically, why when we get to the four G discussion, and if it's the reason I'm thinking of,

it's remarkably simple. Yeah. Well, and this listener, by the way, his name is Arthur, So Arthur Big shout out to you. And uh, let's go into the generations of cell phones. Now, you may be confused somewhat about the various generations and what they mean and and uh, and you know why is one phone a two G phone versus a three G phone or maybe you've even heard of two point five G or three point five or heaven help us

three point seven five G phones. And the reason for this is because they're pulling, not pulling that kind of gs, no, the G standard generations. And that's part of why it's so confusing, is that, you know, we tend to think of generations in terms of iterations right over time, and so technically if something comes out after something else has

already come out, it's a later generation, right. Well. Typically, of course, this is one of those times when marketing also factors into that, and we could get into that a little bit later. Not to pick on the marketers, I used to be in marketing for wild marketers, I've never been in marketing. Well, it's their job to sell you the new thing. And part of the time these generations are an actual new technology and part of them part part of the time it's when improvements are made

to the technology to make it better. And even though it's like quite a new generation, yeah, it's like, well let's talk about yeah, yes, yes, that's the thing that's there's And to add to that confusion, yes, there are two separate lines of cell phone standards have developed over time and and there and there are branches that come off of those two separate lines. But in general, if you want to go all the way back to the one G technologies, there were there were three standards that

were more prevalent than any other. Yes, but there were multiple standards. Now. In the United States, that standard was AMPS, which stood for Advanced Mobile Phone System and that was developed by Bell Labs. In Europe, you had two different standards that were pretty popular. You had TAX, which was t a c S Total Access Communication systema n m T is the other that's Nordic Mobile Telephone. That's the kind of phone that thor uses. And uh so it's me olner Um the So these are the these were

the main standards. And these were all analog mobile phone systems. Yes. Um, actually there's one too. There's one too, there's twelve. Um, there's a another that we mentioned, I believe during the the podcast when we talked about the BlackBerry mobile text. Um. But and and these are all To think of this as a generation compared to the the others is kind of strange because these are all analog technologies. Um. And we're talking, we're talking basic stuff. There's really no maximum

speed because people weren't using data on these connections. They were they were in terms of data transmission, they were so slow that uh uh, you know, we couldn't do a lot of the things that we do on them now. But they didn't use data. In fact, they didn't even use text. We're talking voice voice only. Yeah. They this is when you use your cell phone to call people

the in the United States. In the United States, you would of two carriers per region because the government said that in order to avoid monopolies, there must be at least two carriers, and that they would each be assigned eight hundred and thirty two frequencies. These two carriers seven hundred and ninety of those frequencies were for voice and forty two for data, So forty two for data with seven nine voice. Yeah, you couldn't really use that data

for anything. Yeah, it wasn't well that the phones, of course themselves, were not geared toward doing this. This is back when people used to have bag phones. And yes, I actually did have a bag In fact, it was a second hand bag phone when somebody else traded there's in there were here. You want this? You know, when you had a cell phone that looked essentially like a cordless telephone. Yeah, and you know you didn't necessarily have a screen or anything on there, you just you know,

you had a phone. Yeah. In fact, this, the one that I had, was a handset that was wired to a base and you would plug the base into the power adapter into your car, and you know, if you had to make a call, you'd have to on you know, take it off the cradle. Now, with these frequencies on an individual phone, you would actually have whenever you would

make a call, you'd have a pair of frequencies. So you'd have one frequency for transmitting your voice and another for receiving the voice of the person on the other end of the phone, and together that would create what we call a channel. So these are those old phones

where you would try and switch channels. The whole reason for this, by the way of keeping the frequency separate and keeping the channels discreete is to avoid interference, because some of these old phones you could actually get interference and start to overhear someone else's conversation that you had no business being in in the first place. Actually, I've been in several of those conversations as well, where I

had no business being in that conversation. But in those cases it wasn't due to interference, was just due to chatty. Cathy's right there, you know. An Actually, that's funny in a way because if you think about it, it sort of hearkens back to the time of the party line on on wired telephones, on landlines, um, so that that

sort of lingers in the past for both technologies. So these technologies, these these standards were pretty much the only thing available throughout the eighties and into the early nineties, and it was only in the early nineties when we began to switch from analog cellular systems to digital cellular systems.

So now we had a new competing standards. I'd kind of like to to stop here to talk about sell phones and why they're called cell phones because, um, you know, as you're traveling, the signal from one tower will peter out when you get to a certain point. Um, as long as you are within range of that tower, you

should be able to talk to somebody. But UM, the thing is that it only works as long as you're in range of some kind of communications based So they put these in different areas, and of course when they're mapping that out, UM, they're trying to get a good idea of the coverage area is UM. And they have to of course, uh negotiate with different property owners to

allow these towers to be built. UM. And the reason I'm bringing that up now is this, this first generation came to be known as cell phones because you would travel from one cell the area of of transmission to another, and you would hop from tower to tower. Of course, UM handshake that would take place, that would hand you

off from one another tower exactly. And the funny thing to me is that around the time of this second generation, when we switched from analonger digital, I remember that a lot of the marketing that went on was going on was trying to say, oh, well, we're not a cell phone provider, we're a wireless service provider. And it's it's funny because I think they were trying to use that

as a distinguishing difference in the technology. But if you heard that, um, it wasn't so much that the I mean, you're still traveling from one area of transmission to another area transmission. It has to be handed off from one tower to the next. But um, they wanted to call it something different just to identify that, Hey, you're you're on digital. Now you're on a better quality service. You

have more features and that kind of stuff. You don't have to worry about interference the same way you did with analog. There are a lot of differences. So in Europe that's where Global System for Mobile began. That's g s M, and that standard became pretty prevalent throughout Europe and in other parts of the world as well. The United States also got some g s M. But in the U s the there were two other standards that

started to pop up. One was d AMPS, so Digital AMPS system, and then there was a system from Qualcom called i S nine five, which stands for Interim Standard. Now, this would eventually evolve into code division multiple access phones or c d M A, and so C d M A phones and G s M phones are not compatible. Okay, so we've gotten into the second generation of the standards. But you cannot, uh, you cannot switch out the components of a c d c d M A phone and

G s M phone and have them work. You can't go from a c d M A network to a GSM network or vice versa. So unless you will, you you can if you have a phone that will do that, but you have to have a phone that will be able to communicate on multiple standards. The phone that does that, yeah, has multiple chips and so, in other words, essentially a phone that is allows you to do both c d M A and G s M has both sets of circuitry in the phone, right, Yeah, I just wanted to

clear that up before someone. Right, a standard phone on one of those systems cannot cross over to the other now and go ahead, I'm sorry. I had a the phone I had after the bag phone was on a competing technology to that too, which was a PCs phone. Um. Now that was used much less on some of the others, and these are these were the ones that were the

widespread standards. So when someone says it to G phone, and they usually are talking about something that's running on this old G S M or I S N five or possibly C d um a uh the and these standards also did not have a lot of support for data. They had more so than the analog systems did, but

it still was not ideal. And in fact, the earliest two G phones, the best way to send data besides text messages was to use something called circuit switched data, which involved actually placing a call almost like it's a modem placing a call to another number and then engaging this circuit switched data, which could send information at about fourteen point four kill a bits per second h and uh so still not a great experience if you wanted

to have something like a smartphone. It just wasn't really practical. Yeah, the information I have says that the second generation network second generation networks could hit somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty kill a bits per second um maximum And then really, yeah, and when we start talking about maximums, you guys should know that we're talking about like in the labs, because every time we talk about any standard and we talk about it's maximum speed. That's almost never going to happen

in a real world test. So if you stand right here, right next to the box, you can get oh, let's put that down. I noticed that your pants are glowing. But you're getting great service. Um. So next with too close with g s M, they got a little bit of a boost because actually quite a bit of a boost.

The General Packett Radio Service g p r S integrated with g s M, which created the ability to have a persistent data connection over g s M. Now again, like that that circuit switched data approach that was not that's not persistent, right, you have to initiate it. It's during a live call and then you turn it off. But GPRS allowed for a persistent data connection so you could send data, could be asynchronous. You no longer had to connect directly in order to UH to be able

to get data. If you think about it, it's almost like a DSL connection on a phone line. You can be on the phone and on the computer at the same time. Now, those those signals are traveling through the same copper wire, but in a different part of it, so they're they're as they're asynchronous you don't have to

do them at the same time. Um. One of the things that two G UH switching over to digital too enabled us to do was to use U UM different features like call our I D things that weren't available before, or voicemail and um uh you know, at least according to the information that that I've downloaded from from Motorola, I mean, things like push to talk um those services were not available before. And of course the short Message service.

This is when we started texting. Of course, you know when you're doing that with a U with a two G cell phone, you don't have a keyboard. You are doing this with uh, you know number four four one, not one, but the other number. So this G p R S integration with G s M that actually made things a little more complicated because now you suddenly had a standard that was faster than the other two G standards.

So why do you call it? And here the other thing, here's the other problems that the United Nations Telecommunications Union came up with a set of requirements that you would have to meet in order to call your technology three G. So in this case, it's not it's not a question of how much time has passed it's not even a

question of whether or not it's a new technology. It has to meet certain UM ground level requirements to qualifies three G. Well, even with the g p r S integration, g s M was not hitting the three G requirements, which were at least two megabits megabits per second download speed UM if you were stationary, so if you're if you're staying still with a H three G set, it had to be able to get at least two megabits per second of data or if you were mobile, it

had to be at least three kill bits per second. Well, GSM what GPRS could not do that. So now we refer to that as a two point five G technology because it's faster than two G, but it doesn't quite meet three G requirements. This is I think too about

the time that we started talking about generations. I don't I don't think a lot of people when I when I heard people talking about the second generation of UH cellular technology, I heard them calling it digital or wireless or PCs or you know, they had some other name for it. They weren't saying, hey, move up to two

G UM. But I think when it started UH, when we started getting into these newer technologies as uh, the g p R S. We started hearing, well, this is you know, we're not at three G yet, this is two point five G. And that's when you started hearing it used as a public not not something that the industry would talk about within itself, but to the public. People said, oh, well, this is a this is more than a second generations a shorthand really yeah, and it

gets even more complicated here. All right, So the three G standard is set by the United Nations. Alright, So g s MS next generation was Universal Mobile Telecommunications System u m t S. It starts getting built out. However, around that same time as u m t S network start getting rolled out, another kind of network starts rolling out called c d m A two thousands. So this is back to the other standard, the one that's prevalent

in the United States. Yes, that goes back to two and a half G. That's why it's even more confusing because you have a legitimate three G network rolling out that's u m t S, at the same time as a legitimate three G network is rolling out at two point five networks rolling out called c d m A two thousand. This won't be the last time something like

this happens. No, here's another one. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and do it now because otherwise I'm going to lose my own mind, all right, So here's the second one, which is the Enhanced Data Rates for g S M Evolution or EDGE Network. Now you've got the successor to g S M U M T S that's rolling out. But here's the thing. Not all carriers, not all networks, are going to be able to upgrade at the same level of scale and speed as others.

But they still want to be able to have really good service because if they don't, then they're going to lose all their customers to networks that have better service. Right, this is not the last time that will happen either. So this means that there needed to be some something in between two point five G and three G so that these other carriers could stay afloat while they are working on upgrading their networks. And so that was the development of EDGE, the Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution.

It was developed after three G standards were created, but made so that it could boost two point five G speeds enough so that people wouldn't just abandon it wholesale. So some people will go and call EDGE a two point seven five G, which makes you go crazy because again it came after three G. Did. Well, let's let's talk a little bit about the data too, because um, the g p r S connections would average around thirty to forty kill a bits per second, although you could

get up to about a D fourteen. Again in the lab UM, c d M A two thousand could do about six eight normally, but uh, uh could probably hit around a hundred and forty four killabits per second, and and EDGE was a step up at three and eighty four killabits per second maximum UM. And uh, you know the g p RS and EDGE were both uh forks off the g s M tree. UM. And of course c d M A two thousand was c d M A right, yeah, the and the one that followed up c d UM A two thousand was e v d O,

which is evolution data optimized. Well, I do have another two point seven five which is e g p r S two. Okay, so another another advance on the general Packet Radio service integration exactly, but it's UM, it's only you know, this is also a synchronous because it will do uh four D seventy three kilobits per second upstream

and one point to megabits per second downstream. UM. That means, uh, it's slower when it's sending data from your phone to the network, and faster as a download, which is something you would want. Is that that generally is a consumer

in almost every every four of network I've seen. Did you want to talk about the features two of the two and a half G, because this is when we started getting MMS, the multi media mess multi media message service, UM, basic web browsing, UM, local Asian based services, just really basic stuff. I mean, UM, you know there are some apps that run better because all they have to do is send a short bit of information. So these kinds of things started getting off the ground, but not to

the point where they are now. UM and and and the two point seven five stepped it up a bit in terms of speed and improvements, But three G was really the big change. Yeah, that's where you've got the U M T S which came first. That was the G s M version, So G S M S U M T S uh that that began to develop and roll out first, and then eventually CDMA two thousand successor

e V d OH joined it. So those were the three G standards that that really started to create the the environment that was necessary to have a really robust smartphone type experience. Although we can remember when the you know, I remember when the iPhone went three G m M, so it's kind of interesting that, you know, there was a time where even the iPhone wasn't tapping into these

these uh these standards. Well. Of course, moving to three G gave you full motion video, you could listen to music online, and uh you know, gave us faster uh internet access in general. UM. Now, as far as U M T S, it could do about two megabits per second UM, which is that's that's right there at the threshold for three G. Yeah, and it's also a little

bit faster than a lot of DSL connections. You know, I'm still pretty common in the United States anyway to see a one point five megabit per second DSL connection UM and uh C d M A two thousand uh E V d O revision A would do up to three point one megabits per second. That was a revised

version of e B d oh. Yeah. In fact, that revision ended up causing another discussion about whether or not that should be called three G or three point five G. So eventually some people will go ahead and say that e v d O or Revision A is three point five G because the speeds, the increasing speed was significant enough to boost it up beyond three G, but it's still far as fall below what the International Telecomunsion Telecommunications

Union Radio Communications Sector specified as the requirements for four G, which we'll talk about the second. Yeah, I also have a e v d O or Vision B clocking in and about forty six or so megabets per second UM, which some people call a three point five G, and then there's h S d P A UM. Yeah, alright, so this this would be the three point five upgrade to U m T S. Yes, So again U m T S is the g S M line. Uh HS d P A is high speed down link packet access. They also got h S u P A upgrade, which

is high speed uplink packet access. So essentially what this means is that the improvements to the standards allowed for faster down download and upload speeds. So both e v d O A, Revision A and U MTS with these new upgrades slid into the three point five GUM designation more or less. I mean, it's not even an official designation, but that's kind of where we think about it, because

it's faster than the older versions. UM. Now, in March of two thousand eight, the International Telecommunications Union Radio Communication Sector said, here's what is required for you to call your technology for G and they said, it needs to be able to if you're mobile, it needs to be able to pull down data at a hundred megabits per second, and if you are stationary, it needs to be able to do that at a gigabit per second, uh, which

is you know, it's pretty darned fast. And so now we've got companies trying to develop what will become four G, but no one has actually hit a technology that does this, that hits that does these required standards. UM. There are some talk about getting speeds that are close to that range, and so the companies go ahead and neither say that

their technology is four G or it's got four G speeds. UM. I think the first of those was probably T Mobile USA SO, which was using HSP A plus yes, which was another upgrade to u M T S, which could give around six hundred megabits per second as a theoretical top speed. Uh again theoretical. Uh, still not near the gigabit per second range. It's just over half of that, but not not to the full four G speed. But because it was so much faster than previous generations, again,

what do you do? Do you say that this is the same generation as a phone that can that works at at a fraction of that speed. That doesn't make sense to the consumer. Yeah, I'm I'm just as a personal note, I'm wondering if they maybe set the bar for what they were going to call for G a little high. Yeah, Like the jump between three G and four G was a little too broad. Yeah, because there is a lot of there's a lot of opportunity for layers within those two generations. And as a consumer, it

is confusing. If I walk into a store and I see something labeled three G and something labeled four G, then I just come to an that's a pretty easy conclusion. I'm like, oh, the four G has to be faster because it's newer. If I see two different three G phones, I assume, if I'm an average consumer, that they they transmit data approximately the same speed. But as we've been discussing if if it's a true if they're truly sticking

to three versus four. The variation within that band of three G phones is so great that you cannot be sure that one phone is going to transmit at the same speed as another. And you know, it also depends on a lot of other things too, like where you are and the kind of phone. It is not a traffic, that's network traffic that's going on at that time. Yeah,

I mean there are Yeah. The thing is that uh, you know there we've talked about the different I think we had a conversation about the Verizon iPhone a long time ago and people compared at the time, people were comparing the Verizon iPhone to the A T and T iPhone and talking about the differences in speed and how

much faster it was. Well, I mean they're on two different types of networks, um, And they've built out their networks more, you know, in different ways and things like that, and there are a lot of environmental factors that that may play into the speeds. But um, yeah, the four G what what people are building out now? As FORG networks, basically, for the most part in the United States have been

LTE UH networks long term evolution. Yeah, for a while it was going to it look like it was going to come down between y max and lt E. Now wy max is uh is technology that theoretically could have faster speeds than LTE. UM and both of them have

been development for years. Yeah, so both and and also I should add that neither y max nor LTE comes close to hitting those benchmarks for a four G Even though people have talked about LTE phones being four G phones, they don't still don't hit the the actual benchmarks that were set by the United Nations. So even though you've got, you know, a phone that's much faster than previous phones, if you're going strictly by technical specifications, they are not

truly four G phones, which is again, uh confusing. And at this point I think the carriers and the manufacturers have just sort of thrown their hands up and said, forget it. We're calling it what we want yep yep. Now, Um, part of the reason that uh uh T mobile began the four G marketing boom was because um they did have the hsp A network plus network and uh, you know, it would do much faster speeds under ideal conditions than

than the typical three G networks. So basically, since they're these things are a little on the fast and loose side, they went ahead and said, oh, you know what, we're four G and uh, you know, some others kind of hollered about that and said they're not really four G. But in general, the the consumer isn't really interested in that. The average consumer, the average consumer ones a shorthand way of knowing how fast the phone was and the uh.

The other thing I should mention about y MAX and lt that's different from these earlier technologies is that neither of them have a dedicated uh voice call bandwidth in there. In order to make a call over l t E or y max, you call via void, yes, voice over Internet protocol. So that's you know, that's also different from the previous ones. They oh, there's no h. The entire spectrum within lt E and y max is dedicated to data.

So now we've reached the opposite of what it was when it first started with the analog systems, where it was almost entirely for voice and not data. Now with the latest generations, it's all data, no voice. And part of that is that these these lt N y Max weren't necessarily developed as uh the newest cell phone technology. It's just a data transmission technology that's being adopted by

the cell phone industry, right. I mean, they're there companies within the cell phone industry that worked on developing those standards, but uh, it was more about how do you get data since that's the way a lot of people are using their phones now is really they're using as a

mobile computer rather than a telephone. Um. And uh, the as far as the some recent changes there, they were marketing decisions made on behalf of a certain smartphone manufacturer recently in which they basically agreed to allow their phones to be called for g um when they weren't before are technically and some people were kind of astonished to find out that their phones were suddenly showing four G

on the screen. Now, mine actually does that when I travel, if I switch, if if I'm moving to a tower that has a slower technology, or I think what is trying to do is tell me that the speed is different. But um, you know it will say two G or three G when it drops down. But um, um you know, of course that's also because um, the earlier standards of G S M and C D M A are you know, compatible so you can move from one to another? Um, I think four G networks are are going to require.

I mean, these are not branches of those trees, these are brand new trees. So yeah, that's that's important to point out. And also if you do have a phone that allows you to switch from one like three G two two G. Uh, that's you might wonder why that why you would ever want to do that. I'll tell

you why you want to do that. Okay, Let's say that you are at some major event like don't know, consumer Electronic show C S and UH, and you want to try and check your email and you pop on that three G network and there are two other people trying to pop on that three G network. Popping over to the two G network and using that older technology sometimes is much faster because the network traffic is not

as severe. And I would often switch over specifically to that because it would also drain my battery less as my phone no longer had to try and and keep pinging towers to see if it had a true connection to download any recent data. UM. Yeah, so hopefully we have confused you beyond all measure because accomplished. Yeah, because this is this is definitely a confusing subject just because

the fact that it did not progress linearly either. You know, you had you had companies that would develop a technology that would be in a generation ahead, then go back and develop technologies that fill in gaps, and it wasn't necessarily like if you go chronologically, it doesn't quite match up. And and the fact that you have two different standards, two different lines of standards that are battling it out,

makes it even more confusing. So yeah, it's that's why it's such a mess, and why you know, calling something three G or four G is and and it was arguably somewhat meaningless. You know what, we didn't touch on

one one thing. I think the reason why, because you may be saying, okay, well, if they had three G, why didn't they just go ahead and build an LTE network instead of you know, playing with all these other interim standards, I think that's because the hardware, you know, they could make improvements to those technologies without having to spend as much money as building a whole new tower

with whole new equipment. Um, So they could make improvements to their equipment and offer that to their customers without having to spend the money to invest in a new technology, especially if it wasn't ready yet. Um. And you know, the cell phone business is pretty competitive. So yeah, so people want to you know, if you'll excuse the pun

for once. Um, you know, people want to find an edge over their competitors, and so they're gonna say, oh, we have slightly faster technology than they do, and then they the others leap frog and it just keeps you know, they keep updating firmware and switching out wires and changing a broadcast tower. You know that that's less expensive than going, hey, let's build a whole new network while it's expensive. Good times. So, if you guys have any subjects about which you would

like to be further confused, let us know. You can send us a message via email or adjust it's text stuck at Discovery dot com, or you can contact us on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled. There is tech stuff hs W and Chris and I will talk to you again, maybe on the phone really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join How Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities us tomorrow. The house Stuff Works iPhone

app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you