onments, as does Motorola. 3G Challenges When I talk about 3G wireless I often refer to it as a colossal failure- "a technology looking for a problem to fix." The American telecom market Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Access Technologies Access Technologies suffers from an ongoing love affair with the technologies that underlie the functionality of the network rather than with the capabilities and applications that the technologies facilitate. In my office I have a folder of 3G ads from 1999 to 2000 that herald the service providers' collective abilities to deliver 2 Mbps of bandwidth to the cell phone! Yet, nowhere in those advertising blasts does anyone talk about the applications that a 2 Mbps cell phone might be able to take advantage of. 3G deployment has been plagued with issues. In July 2002, Finland- based Sonera abandoned its $9 billion 3G joint venture with Spain's Telefónica in Germany. At roughly the same time, Orange postponed its Sweden rollout of 3G until 2006. Similarly, Sweden's Tele2 threatened to abandon its planned deployment of 3G in Norway unless the license requirements were changed. In Spain, operators demanded a deposit refund. And why? Because W-CDMA, which was mandated by the EU commission as the de facto standard for 3G systems and upon which the enormously expensive European spectrum auctions were based, did not work as advertised. It had significant hardware interoperability issues. On the other hand, CDMA2000 worked well, as evidenced by the pres- ence of some 17 million users in Korea, Japan, and the United States. Don't lose sight of GSM, however: Its users still dominate the planet in terms of sheer numbers-more than 750 million of them. The Quest for Broadband At the time of this writing there are about 80 million homes in the United States with broadband access, a number that is expected t