3G Cell Phone

International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000), better known as 3G or 3rd Generation, is a family of standards for mobile telecommunications defined by the International Telecommunication Union, which includes GSM EDGE, UMTS, and CDMA2000 as well as DECT and WiMAX. Services include wide-area wireless voice telephone, video calls, and wireless data, all in a mobile environment. Compared to 2G and 2.5G services, 3G allows simultaneous use of speech and data services and higher data rates (up to 14.0 Mbit/s on the downlink and 5.8 Mbit/s on the uplink with HSPA+). Thus, 3G networks enable network operators to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) defined the third generation (3G) of mobile telephony standards – IMT-2000 – to facilitate growth, increase bandwidth, and support more diverse applications. For example, GSM (the current most popular cellular phone standard) could deliver not only voice, but also circuit-switched data at download rates up to 14.4 kbps. But to support mobile multimedia applications, 3G had to deliver packet-switched data with better spectral efficiency, at far greater bandwidths.

In 1999, ITU approved five radio interfaces for IMT-2000 as a part of the ITU-R M.1457 Recommendation; WiMAX was added in 2007.

There are evolutionary standards that are backwards-compatible extensions to pre-existing 2G networks as well as revolutionary standards that require all-new networks and frequency allocations.The later group is the UMTS family, which consists of standards developed for IMT-2000, as well as the independently-developed standards DECT and WiMAX, which were included because they fit the IMT-2000 definition.