2. Find the part of the text “Mobile Multimedia Service” in which the reasons for using wireless access to the Internet are described.

3. Explain why it is necessary to develop multimedia services.

4. Write a summary on the text “Mobile Multimedia Service”. Unit 6

1. Practice the pronunciation of the following words. Translate them into Ukrainian:

scheme, challenge, predecessor, convenience, quality, purvey, tolerance, sustain, circuit, bandwidth, incompatibility, multimedia.

2. Memorize the following words and word combinations:

mainstream voice communication medium – провідний засіб голосового спілкування

predecessor – попередник

battery charging – заряджання батареї

consume – споживати

convenience – зручність

to carry voice traffic – переносити голосову інформацію

delay – затримка

network latency – латентність мереж

carrier – носії

sustain – витримувати

web-browsing – система пошуку і перегляду інформації в Інтернеті

local network access – доступ до місцевої мережі

data rate – швидкість передачі даних

band width – смуга частоти, пропускна здатність

flexible – гнучкий

packet-switched data – комутація пакетів даних

circuit-switched data – передача даних з комутацією каналів

3. Read and translate the text: The mobile phone meets the Internet

Fifteen years ago mobile telephones were an exotic extravagance. Today, as cellular phones, they are often given away as freebies in support of marketing schemes and product promotions. Having become a mainstream voice communication medium, they are poised to take on new challenges, transmitting (fairly) high-speed data, video, and multimedia traffic as well as voice signals to users on the move.

The technology needed to tackle the challenges is known as third generation cellular telephony. From this viewpoint, the early analog cell phones are labeled the first generation, and similar systems featuring digital radio technologies are labeled the second generation. These newer phones have appeared alongside of, and in some places have replaced, their analog forebears.

The principal advantages of second generation phones over their analog predecessors are greater capa­city and less frequent need for battery charging. In other words, they accommodate more users in a given piece of spectrum, and they consume less power.

These two improvements have led, respectively, to lower prices and increased productivity and convenience. Some in the business also claim that digital phones offer better sound quality than analog phones, but that alleged advan­tage is much debated, and some customers feel that the opposite is true.

What is not debatable is that second generation digital networks purvey pretty much the same voice services as do first-generation nets. As far as the user is concerned the services differ little among operators, technologies, and equipment manufacturers. That leaves network operators exposed to churn-the tendency of customers to terminate contracts with one service provider and sign up with another in response to an attractive promotional offering.

The second generation networks retain the inefficient circuit-switched legacy of analog networks. They were, after all, designed to carry voice traffic, which has little tolerance for delay. Data services are more tolerant of network latencies. They offer incremental income for car­riers, and can appear in many forms that encourage a wide variety of terminals and uses. By giving cellular system service providers a chance to stand out with unusual ser­vices, the third generation could reduce churn and help service providers sustain the growth rates to which they have become accustomed.

Third generation proposals strive to overcome the technical limitations of the preceding technologies - whatever prevents the efficient deployment of wire­less e-mail, Web browsing, and corporate local network access as well as videoconferencing, e-commerce, and multimedia.

The proposals are called radio transmission technologies in the argot of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and its International Mobile Telecommunications for the year 2000 (IMT-2000) initiative for the third generation. The chief requirements of any technology of the kind, both declared and implied, include:

• Voice quality comparable to that of the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

• A data rate of 144 kb/s for users in motor vehicles moving fast over large areas.

• A data rate of 384 kb/s for pedestrians, standing still or moving slowly over small areas.

• Phased-in support for 2.048-Mb/s operation for office use.

• Support of both packet-switched and circuit-switched data services.

• An adaptive radio interface suited to the highly asymmetric nature of most Internet communications-a much greater bandwidth for the downlink than the uplink.

• More efficient usage of the available spectrum.

• Support for a wide variety of mobile equipment.

• Flexible introduction of new services and technologies.

Ideally, the third generation should provide seamless personal communications services any time and anywhere. Whereas the transitions from analog to the first digital round were designed to fix problems in the analog systems-like security, blocking, and regional incompatibilities-the migration to the third generation opens up a vista of entirely new services. The price is a big effort for each phase of each migration, with each phase demanding its own business plan.

These trends should last into a fourth generation of even better spectrum efficiencies, higher radio carrier frequencies, even higher user data rates, and a blizzard of new non-voice applications plus the terminals to support them. On the other hand, the third and fourth generation efforts share the risk of becoming content limited-there may be too few applications to attract enough subscribers to fund the investments. The slow and deliberate evolutionary model of mobile radio will still apply even in the fourth generation, but the need for new creativity in applications will over-shadow the controversies surrounding radio techniques and network architectures.