A PC In Your Pocket or How Many Use The Mobile Int...

It is now possible to work in the street with a mobile phone almost like home or office with a PC. You can use these new mobile phones called smartphones without paying much, without managing duplicated emails, contacts, calendar etc. .. or without synchronizing data with a still camera.

The aim of this paper is to first provide some guiding principles to use and very practical advice to make best use these new phones.

The mobile phone: how does it work?

I started with a mobile phone in 1985 with the analog system Radiocomm 2000. It was a classic radio transceiver. The voice quality was very poor, the time of establishment of a communication very long, expensive pricing. The number of users was limited by a small number of frequencies available.

Digital mobile telephony began in the early 1990s in Europe with the advent of GSM (Global System for Mobile). The system transmits voice and text messages (SMS) to digital. The sound quality has become convenient. The set-up is a few seconds. The problem has been fixed frequency by the juxtaposition of cells of varying sizes that allow hundreds of simultaneous calls per cell. The price of equipment has become very cheap as and when increasing the number of units sold. It remains the cost of communications, still too high in France because of an oligopoly. The arrival in early 2010 for Free in this landscape will perhaps shake the status quo.

The deployment of the Internet has led to a request for access by mobile phones, not just to provide the necessary speed, the voice channel is limited to ten kbps We remember the flop of WAP and dashed hopes to UMTS. Today most “Smartphones” are compatible GSM, GPRS (30-40 kbps), EDGE (80-115 kbps) and HSDPA (7.2 Mbit / s downstream and 128Kbit / s upstream) . The type of active connection (switching is automatic) is usually indicated on your phone (E for EDGE, HSDPA H, etc. ..) and varies depending on where you are. In addition to these mobile networks, your phone can connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi and has a Bluetooth wireless connection to connect to a headset or stationary equipment such as a PC. It is also generally possible to connect via USB to a PC to exchange files or recharge the battery.

What Are the Reasons For The Success of The Intern...

There are four main reasons for the success of the Internet: The unique address, TCP/IP, universal basic services and communications costs low.

The Address Unique: individual@place

The IP protocol assigns each computer a unique address of 32 bits which is usually written as four 8-bit numbers written in decimal and separated by dots: 194.2.94.60. These addresses are assigned to networks of computers in blocks of 16 million, 65 536 or 256 (Class A, B or C). At current rates, address blocks will soon be exhausted and IP addresses with 32 bits will be replaced by a protocol with 128-bit addresses.

For ease of use, these addresses can be written in the symbolic form well known for e-mail: individual@place. Computers called DNS (Domain Name Server) perform the conversion between symbolic address and IP address. For example, my email address is written: admin@thefearnetwork.com.

TCP/IP

The success of TCP / IP is its universality and simplicity. TCP / IP was developed under the auspices of the DoD (Department of Defense U.S. government) independently of any particular system or supplier. It is available on all types of computers and provides full interoperability between different vendors.

While most network protocols provide a high level of service (addressing, routing and guaranteed throughput for example), TCP / IP does nothing and leaves all the responsibility of the user. For example, the protocol does not guarantee the order of arrival of packets, or even their delivery. The result is a network very easy to install with good performance. What could be considered a disadvantage when computers were less powerful, has become an advantage today. The protocol only uses a fraction of the power of modern computers.

The network infrastructure has a switching function. It is therefore independent of any application and can support applications as diverse as file transfer or video conferencing.

Of Universal Basic Services

The basic services provided with TCP/IP contributed to the success of the Internet. The first service is of course the electronic mail (email) that thanks to the unique address (individual@place) can communicate more than just the phone. Other services are terminal emulation (Telnet allows you to remotely connect to any type of computer), file transfer (FTP), newsgroups (Usenet) and Internet relay chat (IRC).

Communication Costs Very Low

The network providing no service, its operating cost comes down to the installation of switches called “routers” and fixed links between these routers. The fixed costs of infrastructure are allocated to users according to the flow of Internet access required. Each user installs the level of service required his computers and supervision of its DNS. This explains why the network can support such rapid growth. Each user adds the extra processing required. This pattern, in contrast to the usual practices of telecom operators, will result in the coming years of considerable upheaval in the telecommunications world.