Do you enjoy using WiFi but hate the confinement that it comes with? Mobile broadband is quickly becoming a better, more accessible alternative to WiFi, offering DSL bandwidth speeds to customers through their laptops, netbooks, mobile phones and PDAs. Mobile broadband is a step up from local wireless data applications such as WiFi which gets rid of the wire, but not the confinement. A user must be stationary and in a WiFi hotspot (generally inside) when using WiFi technology. WiFi could be considered as the data transfer counterpart of the cordless telephone, whereas mobile broadband corresponds to the cellular phone, which enables access to high speed data almost anywhere in the world. Wireless communication has become the standard for the business world. Remote wireless internet connection is becoming more and more popular each day and has changed the way businesses communicate internally and externally. It truly has become a wireless world.
Mobile broadband works in a similar way to mobile phone communications that use radio waves and frequencies to send and receive data. This digital information is sent in packets to and from the cell phones and telephone communication towers. With standard mobile telephone calls, the data that is transmitted and received is only in an audio format. Alternatively, the digital data that is communicated through cell phones and towers is in various formats such as web page data, audio data, visual data such as videos and also emails.
Since the introduction of mobile broadband, technology has progressed quire rapidly, below is a chronological list of the improving formats:
-The first form of mobile broadband was EDGE, also known as 2.5g. Though it was quite slow and expensive, so take up was poor.
-After EDGE came 3g or UMTS. 3g was a little quicker and became a decent alternative if there were no WiFi hotspots available.
-Following 3g was HSDPA. It is quite fast, though not as fast as WiFi.
-The latest standard is HSUPA. HSUPA can give users mobile broadband speeds almost equal to WiFi and has a good coverage ratio.
In the not too distant future is 4g, also known as WIMAX. It is reported that WIMAX will offer much faster speeds than is currently available through most WiFi connections also combined with a wide network coverage ratio. Most notebook manufacturers are beginning to offer hardware shipped with their products that is able to access mobile broadband. This means that using wires to connect to the internet, even in your home, could be redundant within the next 10 years.
