EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The mobile web is growing at a phenomenal pace, and it is forecast to overtake the desktop web in 2014: in other words, more users will access the Internet using a mobile phone rather than a PC for the first time. Approximately 900 million people currently access the web with mobile phones, compared to 1.4 billion desktop Internet users. In 2014, mobile web users will outpace desktop users (approximately 1.7 billion mobile users to approximately 1.65 billion desktop users). By 2015, the number of mobile web users is expected to increase to 2 billion. Assuming an annual growth rate of about 2 percent annually between 2010 and 2015 in cell phone subscriptions (77 percent of the world's population will have cell phone subscriptions in 2010 and 87 percent will have subscriptions in 2015), about 6.35 billion people worldwide will have a mobile phone subscription and approximately 1 out of 3 subscribers(or 2 billion out of 6.35 billion) will be accessing the Internet on mobile phones.

With the ubiquity of mobile devices and the increasing popularity of mobile Internet, 3G networks are being rapidly deployed around the world. Countries in the Global South and the Global North are switching to 3G networks from slower 2G networks. Morgan Stanley forecast that 3G penetration will grow exponentially, reaching 2,776 million (43 percent of global mobile phone subscribers in 2014), but growth in 3G networks will be concentrated in the Global North. Depending on usage of devices and networks, users in the Global South will be of two types: (1) Those who access the mobile Internet through 3G networks and smartphones. These users will be more similar in user behavior to users in the Global North who use smartphones and 3G networks than to users in their own countries who dont have faster devices or networks. (2) Users who use low-end devices on slow networks.

The third generation of mobile cellular systems are intended to unify the diverse systems we see today into a seamless radio infrastructure capable of offering a wide range of services in different radio environments, with the quality we have come to expect from wire line communication networks.

Since the mid-80s, studies on 3G systems have been carried out within the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where it was called Future Public Land Mobile Telecommunication Systems (FPLMTS), lately renamed International Mobile

Telecommunicatons-2000 (IMT-2000). In Europe research and development on 3G technology, is commonly referred to as the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) and Mobile Broadband System (MBS), have been conducted under the European Community Research into Advanced Communications in Europe (RACE) and Advanced Communication Technologies and Services (ACTS) programs. With support from activities in Europe, the United States, Japan and developing countries, World Administrative Radio Conference (WARC) of ITU identified global bands 1885-2025Mhz and 2110-2200Mhz for IMT-2000 including 19802010Mhz and 2170-2200Mhz for the mobile satellite component. Key elements in the definition of 3G systems are the radio access system and Radio Transmission Technology (RTT). As a part of the standardization activities, a formal request by the ITU-Radio communication standardization sector (ITU-R) for submission of candidate RTTs for IMT-2000 has been distributed by the ITU. In response to this 10 proposals were submitted. Most of the proposals use CDMA or WCDMA as their multiple access technique. So in this seminar we are presenting the common features of WCDMA based 3G standards.