Challenges
Réseaux cellulaires

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 sectors to work together and invent new services that reflect this convergence. We...