Challenges

With UMTS in Europe, and more generally with the IMT2000 project, three independent sectors of the communications world are set to converge:

• the IT sector, with data transmission becoming a widely-used basic service, whereas GSM, until the arrival of GPRS, had relegated data services to the status of costly and relatively inconvenient access options;

• the video sector, which is totally absent from second-generation networks;

• the voice sector, the traditional vector for first- and second-generation network services.

One of the major challenges of UMTS is to get the players in these different...