Cellular mobile telecommunications and the World Wide Web are growing at an exciting pace. In the year 1999 both GSM and the Internet reached more than 200 million registered users globally. Thus, it may be expected that users will demand the combination of mobility and multimedia services in a foreseeable time frame. Multimedia content increases and differentiates with the changing information society, and an even richer variety of audio, visual, and text-based information will be required in the future. UMTS, the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, a member of the IMT-2000 family of thirdgeneration systems, will provide these services. UMTS standardization has set a new paradigm of timely market-driven standardization in a global partnership of standardization bodies.
The mobile Internet, ubiquitous computing and universal mobile communications are key words related to the integration of information technology and communications. Until today, the Internet has been dominated by non-realtime services based on client-server relations. As its continued developments encompass realtime voice and video, peerto-peer communications will emerge. Consequently, the take-up of Internet technologies in mobile networks leads to new innovations there. This chapter describes the evolution path of mobile networks and services in the framework of the universal mobile telecommunication system UMTS.
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