After 22 long years, third-generation (or better known as 3G) mobile telephone service for the general public has ended across Australia. Sometimes also known as the “Universal Mobile Telecommunications System” or UMTS for short, or by its radio bearer technology known as “wide code-division multiple access” or WCDMA for short, this was truly a generation worth remembering in my opinion. It was the successor to the second-generation digital systems including GSM and CDMA (along with its upgraded variants) which saw use in Australia.

A lot has changed in the intervening 19 years, but my fondness for 3G and what it enabled will always have a place in my heart. As a result, I saw it time to give it a fitting tribute in the only way I know how – a long-form blog post.

A Generational Leap

In many ways, 3G was a generational leap in both capabilities and bandwidth. It started our transition away from a network that focused primarily on voice to one that was adept at both voice and data. It didn’t foresake the older 2G/GSM technology either, instead, designed to hand-off with the older technology as well, easing the upgrade path.

Back in the 2G days, the limits of affordable radio silicon was much more limited than today and the channel bandwidths had to be narrow, 200kHz to be precise. To support multiple users at the same time, frequency division multiplexing (FDM) was used – essentially having separate channels (or lanes) running in parallel. Finally, each channel would have been broken up into eight time-slots – a form of time-domain multiplexing (TDM). The net result was acceptable for voice calls but only resulted in 9.6kbit/s circuit-switched data (think modem-over-a-mobile-call). It also resulted in the familiar “bip-bip-bip” or “brrrrrrr” noise that might be emanated from speakers due to the RF transmitter transmitting in each of its allocated timeslots but turning off in-between. The 2G technology eventually had general-purpose packet radio system (GPRS) added on, bringing data rates up to dial-up modem speeds (often about 32-40kbit/s in reality). The final hurrah for 2G was EDGE, pushing data rates to around 236kbit/s. We often forget that the first iPhone launched in 2007 was only capable of 2G/GSM/EDGE connectivity.

So when 3G arrived with “release 99”, it promised 384kbit/s right off the bat, which steadily increased to 14Mbit/s with HSDPA (release 5), topping out at 42Mbit/s with DC-HSDPA+ (release 8) under ideal network conditions. While further evolution did continue into providing several-hundred megabit connectivity, this was a role that 3G’s successor, LTE would take on. The physical layer would use CDMA techniques, but was unrelated to the 2G “CDMA” that consumers would have known and often thought inferior due to its unpopularity compared to GSM. I suppose this was an acknowledgement of some of the benefits of CDMA, which include making frequency co-ordination easier and allowing better spectrum re-use. The carriers themselves were 5MHz, much wider than in GSM, and while this was initially considered spectrum-hungry, pushing the limits of what affordable consumer technology could do, it was also very much a push for efficiency and capacity. After all, unlike GSM, it was customary to have all your base-stations synchronised and on the same frequency since CDMA used coding to separate transmissions from one-another, rather than frequency.

Nevertheless, the increase in data access speed bought along by 3G was dramatic, enabling features such as video calling (which was surprisingly unpopular) and multimedia messaging (MMS). But most importantly, it could provide “broadband-level” wireless internet access at a time when devices were becoming more sophisticated, ultimately rendering the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) obsolete for most purposes. It would do so in a manner that was finally affordable to the public – soon banishing the fears of “accidentally” hitting the mobile browser app on a phone and watching all your prepaid credit drain away in a matter of seconds. Gone were also the radio interference “bips” which became more white-noise in character. But as we will see, it was not all wins either.

What It Meant to Me … and Why It Matters

I would consider myself an early-adopter of the smartphone. In fact, when I bought into a second-hand O2 XDAii Mini back in my high-school days, the word smartphone didn’t exist and it were merely considered a Pocket PC or PDA with mobile capability. This first device of mine ran Windows Mobile 2003SE, which I absolutely adored, had an SD card slot and pretty ropey 1.3MP camera that had a selfie “mirror”. But my biggest lament was that it had Pocket IE but I couldn’t afford data for it at all.

Later on, I upgraded to a second-hand iMate JASJAR, a flip/rotating Pocket PC with 3G connectivity. It was still a year until the iPhone would launch and at this time, it looked to me that data-on-the-go started to seem feasible (financially) albeit not initially. This was because 3G increased the supply of bandwidth dramatically and it seemed that the growing market of mobile network virtual operators (MVNOs) such as Boost, Virgin Mobile, amaysim were willing to cut prices and bundle-in data with their plans. The allowances were often small initially – perhaps just 100MB on my Virgin Prepaid plans in the late 2000s, but they were enough to get a taste of true mobile freedom.

Of course, the 3G experience was not a good one at the outset. I think it’s a recurring pattern that has shown itself time-and-time-again. At the time of 3G’s introduction to Australia in 2002 (Telstra), 2003 (Hutchison Three, later merged with Vodafone) and 2005 (Optus, Vodafone), the band for UMTS was 2100MHz. This was a much higher frequency than the 850-900MHz commonly used by 2G-GSM. As a result, every early-adopter had a first-hand lesson in the physics of radio-wave propagation through building materials whether they liked it or not. I recall many frustrations where, having 3G turned on, I would only see one signal bar and often fail to answer calls (any attempt just “hung” the phone and eventually lost the call) simply because propagation was too poor to support the communications. Disabling 3G was the fix – four bars easily and no missed calls. At a time when calling and SMS was still the primary means of communication, trading calls for data was just not feasible.

The other downside of 3G, at least initially, was simply that early 3G chipsets absolutely chewed through power. Having 3G turned on suffered both the need to transmit at higher powers to get through building materials, but also the inefficiency of the earlier silicon, for a double-whammy at a time when battery life was already at a premium. So it was a sad case of having 3G but not being able to use it at least until later devices came along, a common experience for any early-adopter.

By the early 2010s, prices for mobile data access were falling so dramatically that it even became viable for some low-usage users to replace their dialup or broadband services with mobile data instead. Many MVNOs had offers in the AU$10/GB range which I felt was an “affordable” price for light users to make the switch, especially considering that dial-up users needed a phone line of which line rental was about AU$30/month, plus calls to the ISP, and ADSL broadband plans (even naked plans using ULLS) were about AU$45/month at the least. My father was one of these users, and so was I when I went over to visit. Back then, sites were “lighter” in resource requirements and video wasn’t as much of a thing for us. Unfortunately, this honeymoon only lasted until the mid-2010s, with the influx of Optus MVNOs causing the 3G supply and demand equation to skew strongly towards demand. From the early-2010s when 3-7Mbit/s was the norm for me, I was down with slow patches for hours at 30-40kbit/s by the mid-late 2010s. The 4G LTE connectivity couldn’t have come sooner to take the pressure off this situation, but at least, I wasn’t on Three/Vodafone (more on this in a bit).

Another thing to realise was simply that not all devices worked the same. In the 2G era, you have a GSM phone, you can most likely call and SMS with the same level of performance you’d expect (perhaps excepting differences in codec support, antenna gain, transmitter power/receiver sensitivity which any digital voice radio system would be subject to). But a 3G device would have various “Categories” which denotes their capabilities in terms of supported modulations, carriers (and consequently, speed). So consumers were perhaps first exposed to the notion that not all access devices are “the same” in terms of capability, a fact that continues onto now. This makes it perhaps somewhat