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At a time when the telecommunications market is starting to express serious doubts about the medium term profitability of UMTS, equipment vendors and operators continue their campaigns to promote this technology as the ideal media for providing high speed communications and broadcasting multimedia content. This optimistic outlook, although justified from a marketing point of view, is raising a number of misconceptions in many people’s minds regarding the actual speeds that will be available to the end user.

We often hear talk of 2 Mbit/s, but this is in fact the total data rate available on an individual base station sector which otherwise will normally comprise three sectors. These 2 Mbit/s will therefore be shared between all the users connected to the sector and using the data services. As a result, we can assume that in a densely built up area, no one will really get the benefit of the 2 Mbit/s, unless no more than three people are actually using the service within a radius of approximately one kilometer around the station.

Depending on the scenarios used, the UMTS traffic studies that we have conducted here at ATDI call for available data rates of around several tens of Kbit/s. This is better than GSM (9.6 Kbit/s), but still a long way from the «high speed» provided by ADSL, LMDS or 41 GHz links. In other words, UMTS will be an access technology that is «wider band than» GSM, but the quality of the multimedia services offered will doubtless be far less than that available via fixed wire or radio access technologies by 2004 (between 512 Kbit/s and 4 Mbit/s guaranteed for home users). No doubt this explains why, in North America, people are already seriously talking about the 4th Generation.