Written by: Torbjörn Nilsson

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During the next few years, mobility-enabling technology will embrace the Internet. The resulting new dimension of communications will put the Internet into the pockets of hundreds of millions of people. Even today, we can witness the beginnings of these developments, which will further influence the development and evolution of future networks, including the architecture, backbones, applications, and mobile access.The immediate challenge is to make existing networks ready to deliver multiple services—voice, data and multimedia—in real time across public and private networks and at a guaranteed end-to-end level of quality. In this article, the author describes the requirements for the third generation of mobile multimedia communication and how dissimilar second-generation standards are being converged and enhanced to provide third-generation services. He also walks the reader through an overview of third-generation networks, briefly outlining the backbone network, mobile network access, and mobile terminal networks.

[First published in Ericsson Review no. 03, 1999]