In Convergence and Competition – A Tale of Two Standards Part 1 (the Early Years: Peaceful Co-Existence) (sepessentials.com), I discussed the early peaceful co-existence of two of the world’s most important telecommunications standards, cellular and WiFi, in the early days of each standard. In those days, WiFi and cellular carried different types of information (data vs voice) using different protocols (IP vs circuit switched) on different portions of the spectrum (unlicensed vs licensed bands). The standards were largely created by different companies to use in different locations (indoor vs outdoor) using different types of devices (laptops/IoT devices vs phones).
Things began changing in the mid-2000s, however, as forces emerged on each side—WiFi and cellular—that started to drive the functionality of the two technologies closer together. This post is about those changes.
The First Smartphone – Cellular Data
On the cellular side, Apple’s iPhone, was released in 2007.[1] The iPhone is credited by many with being the world’s first smartphone.[2] It combined a mobile cellular telephone with a “stunning” display. It had the ability to browse the Internet, send and receive emails, take photographs and store them on the phone and to listen to your favorite music all at the touch of the screen. It had an “elegant” keyboard that eliminated the press press press of early SMS texting.
Before the iPhone, cell phones were mostly about making calls (but see my note in [1]). On the data side, they mostly only had the capacity to send short text messages. As others have said:
In the pre-iPhone era, mobile devices were often clunky and offered limited functionality. People carried a multitude of gadgets to meet their various needs: flip phones for calls, digital cameras for photography, MP3 players for music, and personal digital assistants (PDAs) for basic productivity. The iPhone was a game-changer, bringing all these functions into a single, sleek device. iPhone History: From the Original iPhone to iPhone 16 (seamgen.com)
In order to bring all of these functions together, the original iPhone had to implement not only 2G cellular technology but also 802.11 b/g WiFi (and Bluetooth). It used 2G for cellular calling and SMS texts because, even though 3G had already been released, many cellular carriers had not yet upgraded to 3G. But 2G had almost no data capacity.[3] So, the first Apple iPhone used 802.11 because data transfer rates for 2G were so slow it would have been impossible to use a purely 2G device for many of the smartphone’s applications.
Apple released a 3G version of the iPhone in 2008.[4] The first Android phone, the “weird” but “loveable” HTC Dream (aka the T-Mobile G1), also debuted in 2008.[5] Like the iPhone, the first Android phone implemented 3G cellular, 802.11b/g and Bluetooth.[6] 3G was an improvement over 2G for data. But even using 3G, Apple, HTC and the other smartphone makers that emerged would have been hard pressed to support all of their smartphone’s applications if they had only implemented the 3G cellular standard. According to one report, the original W-CDMA 3G networks offered data rates of up to .384 Mbps (384 kbps) for mobile devices while the fastest later version of 3G (using HSPA+) could provide download speeds only as fast as 42 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 22 Mbps.[7] Others have pegged the speed of 3G as an average of only 2 Mbps.[8] In contrast, 802.11g (which had been released in 2003) allowed for data transfer rates up to 54 Mbps in either direction.[9]
So, even with 3G, these smartphones, of necessity, implemented the WiFi standard because the 3G cellular standard could not support every feature contained in these new “smart” phones at the speed and with the low latency required.
In addition, the costs of using cellular data were astronomical: it cost more for cellular data back in 2007 than most people currently pay.[10] We forget in this modern era of all you can eat cellular data service for one (low-ish) monthly rate how expensive telephone services (both landline and cellular) were when the first iPhone and first Android phone were released.[11] The early smartphones also relied upon Wi-Fi for data heavy applications rather than cellular as a mechanism of avoiding the high cost of cellular data.
Even today, cellular has not supplanted WiFi in cell phones: most current smart phones still implement both. But, these early smartphones were indeed game changers. The emergence of smart phones with their heavy data demands did drive the cellular standard towards more and better data carrying capabilities. Where once the cellular standard had been optimized only for voice (2G) or with very slow, limited data capacity (3G), with the smartphone driven next generation of the standard, 4G “Long Term Evolution” (4G/LTE),[12] the cellular standard became capable of transmitting much larger amounts of data much more quickly with decreased latency.
Growing Use of Voice over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”) – WiFi Calling
The same high telephone tariffs that were one of the reasons why smartphones implemented WiFi for data also were one of the reasons behind the push to develop new technology that would allow people to entirely avoid making phone calls over the expensive public switched telephone network (“PSTN”).
The Internet essentially became accessible to the public in the early 1990s. Not too long after, in 1995, the first commercial voice over internet protocol product was released by VocalTec.[13] It was not a telephone based system – in order to make a call you had to put an app onto your computer and then could only “call” someone else who also had the same app on their computer. One of my friends worked at VocalTec at the time and she was always trying to get me to do this. I always refused because, at that time, I could not imagine wanting to talk to someone from my computer. Oh how times have changed. But that was one of the reasons why VocalTec’s product ultimately did not succeed: you could not make telephone calls to and from other telephones on other networks. Voice quality also was poor because the Internet could not yet handle the bandwidth, speed and low latency requirements for voice communications.[14] Something more was needed for mass acceptance of what was becoming known as VoIP.
Over the course of several years, a number of different standards, most notably H.323 (released by the International Telephone Union “ITU” in 1996) and the Session Initiation Protocol (“SIP” released by the Internet Engineering Task Force “IETF” in 1999), were developed to make VoIP calling more like using an actual telephone.[15] VoIP phones hit the market in a big way in the early 2000s.[16]
With the right service connection, those phones allowed VoIP calls over the Internet to telephones residing on the PSTN or on a cellular network, and vice versa. The early 2000s also saw increased access to broadband Internet connections and better audio and video codecs to carry multimedia data at higher volumes, faster speeds, lower latency over the Internet. The cost also was much lower than traditional landlines and VoIP began to supplant landlines as a preferred way of making calls from homes and offices.
These were not WiFi specific improvements or WiFi specific standards. However, in 2005, an update to the 802.11 standard (802.11e) was released to define certain quality of service parameters needed to support better wireless VoIP as well as video streaming.[17] So, around the same time as the first iPhone was released which increased demand for data capacity on the cellular networks, broadband capacity and VoIP services matured enough to require changes to the WiFi standard to increase WiFi’s capability to carry telephone calls (and also to stream video). WiFi functionality and cellular functionality were starting to converge.
802.11n and 4G/LTE
These two trends – data into cellular and voice into WiFi – really took off in the next generation of each standard, 802.11n and 4G/LTE. The 802.11n standard was released in October, 2009. It introduced multiple-input multiple output (MIMO), beamforming and various other changes to achieve much faster data rates and to increase the signal intensity and thus the range of transmission. It offered up to five times the performance of its predecessor (with achievable speeds of 450 Mbps) and an increased transmission range (about 175 feet for an Apple Airport Extreme).[18]
As with many things cellular, determining the release date for 4G is a bit complex.[19] Many use 2009 as the date the first real 4G technology was released, although the ITU did not agree that LTE was part of the 4G standard until 2010. 4G/LTE also used MIMO technology to increase data speed. But, the average transmission speed for data still was significantly less than that achieved by 802.11n. According to one report, 4G/LTE had a theoretical average speed of 50 Mbps but they achieved only 17.5 Mbps average in actual operation.[20] But 4G was on the track to fast data: the version of 4G/LTE being used today is not the same as the version that was released in 2009. There were a number of updates that occurred after the initial release which resulted in much improved data speeds.
Conclusion
In my previous post Is SEP Licensing Necessary to Encourage SEP Development - Part 2 (sepessentials.com, I said that “2010 was, for the most part, an unremarkable year both for technology and for the 802.11 standard." That’s not quite accurate. 2010 was the year that 802.11n and 4G/LTE really began to supplant their predecessors. And it was the year that the 802.11 working group and 3GPP each became more focused on what would come after the release of these substantially improved versions of the standards.
My next post in this occasional series will focus on how and why we got to what resulted from that focus: the current “frenemy” era characterized by increasing competition between the standards and increasingly bad behavior by some standard developers.
[1] See Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone - Apple and iPhone History: From the Original iPhone to iPhone 16 (seamgen.com). A history side note: the first “iPhone” was not the Apple iPhone but a VoIP phone released by Infogear in 1998. See, What the first 'iPhone' looked like... back in 1998 (bgr.com).
[2] Some people credit IBM with creating the first “smartphone” in 1992. See Smartphone History: The Timeline of a Modern Marvel (textedly.com). But, it can be “tricky to answer” the question of “What was the first smartphone” since different phones each had aspects of what we consider standard on a modern smartphone. A history of mobile phones and smartphones - BBC Bitesize.
Several companies such as Research in Motion (maker of Blackberry devices) and Palm had devices in the 1990s that allowed for paging and email. But they were “personal digital assistants” (“PDAs”): they didn’t carry voice and were not phones. Back then, “many were still satisfied with a cellphone in one hand and a PDA in the other.” RIM: A brief history from Budgie to BlackBerry 10 and Palm products through the years (photos) - CNET; see also RIM’s rise and fall: A short history of Research In Motion | Globalnews.ca.
By the early to mid-2000s, the PDA makers had added phone service to their devices. Other companies such as Nokia and Ericsson started out as cell phone makers and by the mid-2000s had added data and other services to their phones. But it was not until the launch of the iPhone that phones started to look and act like today’s smartphones. See, A look back at every iPhone ever | CNN Business. The first Android phone launched the following year along with the 3G iPhone. These dual launches ignited the smartphone market.
[3] In 2G, the only “data” that was really transferable was SMS texts. Comparison of 2G 3G 4G 5G | 2G vs 3G vs 4G vs 5G | 5G vs 4G | Difference between 4G and 5G | Rantcell.
[10] Data plans: the barrier to mobile Internet adoption - Ars Technica and iPhone+AT&T Bill=Uh-Oh - The New York Times (nytimes.com) (I love this description of his first AT&T bill for the new iPhone: “a staggeringly, hatefully complex document, designed by some Monty Pythoneseque committee in charge of consumer confusion”). Although some of the pricing looks similar to today, remember this was being paid in 2007 dollars.
[11] The cost of landlines and long distance calling was so high that people came up with inventions just to try to reduce the cost. See for example, some of the notorious “Rates” patents: U.S. 4,122,308 (“A telephone accessory device for monitoring the cost of a telephone call at the location of the calling telephone”); 5,425,085 (“A device interconnects within a phone line coming from a first phone and routes telephone calls along a least cost route”) and 5,881,139 (“An apparatus for placing a toll telephone call using a lowest cost long distance carrier”).
[12] Timeline from 1G to 5G: A Brief History on Cell Phones - CENGN. When “4G first started, it wasn’t actually 4G.” In other words, although the standard initially had a goal of higher speeds, it did not become capable of those higher speeds until later generations of the standard.
[13] The History of VoIP and Internet Telephony: 1920s to Present (getvoip.com) and The History of VoIP // SIPSTACK.
[16] VoIP phones had been available for several years before then but it wasn’t until around 2000 that they became more common. See for example, ttpnp_bc (cisco.com)