UMTS - Universal Mobile Telecommunications System

General information

The acronym UMTS stands for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System. As the title suggests it marks the third generation of mobile phone standard. What makes UMTS but so impressive? Is it its high data transfer rate. It achieves a speed of up to 2 Mbit/s, but can unfortunately only be achieved regionwide. But its high-speed capability will especially work in major metropolitan areas such as railway stations, airports and shopping centers. Thus, UMTS has a much higher data rate than the global system for Mobile Communications (GSM). The average transfer rate amounts up to 384 kbit/s and is well enough to perform a professional and high quality video conference.

Signal frequency (uplink & downlink)
The signal frequency for uplink is in a range from 1920 MHz up to 1980 MHz. For the downlink it is from 2110 MHz to 2170 MHz. There are four different operators with this useful frequencies. Vodafone claims the lowest values with an uplink from 1920.3 MHz to 1930.2 MHz and a downlink from 2110.3 MHz to 2120.2 MHz. The next is E-PLUS with an uplink from 1940.1 MHz to 1950.0 MHz and a downlink from 2130.1 MHz to 2140.0 MHz. The operator of O2 has an uplink from 1959.9 MHz to 1969.8 MHz and a downlink of 2149.9 MHz to 2159.8 MHz. Last but not least is the leading operator of T-Mobile with an uplink from 1969.8 MHz to 1979.7 MHz and a downlink from 2159.8 MHz to 2169.7 MHz.

Applications:
There are extensive applications possible. Starting with mobile audio and video transmissions, mobile Internet access, e-commerce and plenty of multimedia applications such as ring tones. However, UMTS means a huge investment for the operators, since the number of required base stations to cover the whole area is about 8000-10000 per network.

The development of UMTS had a positive impact in the mobile world and there are very good future prospects.