DALLAS - Get ready for another acronym. It's 3G, short for third-generation wireless network. It's one worth remembering because - if it can live up to the hype - it will impact our world with the same magnitude, perhaps, that personal computers have.

So what is it? 3G technology promises to let us connect to the Internet wirelessly at high speed from anywhere there is a cellular phone signal. It would do so at speeds approaching two megabits per second.

That's the same speed at which so-called high-speed Internet services are connecting computers to the Internet today, using either a cable modem or digital subscriber lines. But real-world performance will likely come in at a fraction of that. Think about the variations of service quality that we get with voice calls on a mobile phone and you get an idea of how data speeds will dribble and spurt.

3G will give any device high-speed wireless data services, though it will initially show up on mobile phones as they mutate into information terminals and as hand-held devices mutate into phones.

"It may be the biggest revolution in technology in our life time," said Richard Siber, a senior partner with Accenture's communications practice. The wireless guru was speaking at 3G University, a Nokia-sponsored two-day briefing designed to bring North American journalists up-to-speed on the promised technology.

In recent weeks, 3G has also had some bad press. Carl Yankowski, CEO of Palm Inc., made headlines when he told the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Software and Internet Council that "3G is overhyped." He urged carriers to focus on a more reachable wireless data technology called 2.5 G, which provides about 250 kilobits-per-second data connections.
Both Sipher and Yankowski are right, though Yanksowski needs a lesson in telecommunications. Carriers will go to 2.5G anyway as it a natural stepping stone to 3G in the upgrade path.

To understand where all this is going a history lesson is in order. The first mobile phone networks were analog. That was 1G or first generation. That migrated in recent years to 2G, which encompasses technologies that run digital cellular phones, also known as PCS phones. These phones have improved voice capabilities but have anemic data capabilities. 2G Web phones connect no faster than at 14.4 kbps.

The next phase is 2.5G. This is a halfway measure on the way to full 3G data speeds. 2.5 and 3G switches the data technologies from a circuit-switch network to a packet-switch network. The difference between the two is analogous to a dial-up Internet connection versus always-on high-speed connections.

2.5G bandwidth is expected to sit in the 115 to 384 kbps range. Once again, real world experience will be more like half that. You'll see 2.5G connectivity emerge later this year in North America.

The wireless telecommunications industry has been promising 3G for years, but it has yet to materialize as a real technology. That's because the costs to upgrade networks run into billions of dollars, according to Nokia experts. Nokia, of course, has a vested interest in making 3G happen because it sells the network gear that goes into 3G infrastructures and mobile handsets that will access those networks.

There's a problem with these grand plans because there has to be a business case for the carriers to each spend millions of dollars to upgrade the networks. Their argument: Why offer high-speed data if you can't charge for it? No consumer is going to pay by the minute for always-connected data services on their phones. Flat-rate plans may help subsidize the technology, but there has to be an opportunity for the carriers to make substantial money with data networks, given the substantial investment.

There are two driving forces. One is chargeable services. More about that in a minute. The other is aggressive competition from Japan, land of early technology adopters.

Next year, DoCoMo iMode is coming to North America. I-Mode is Japanese technology that has put usable wireless data into the hands of 20 million Japanese mobile phone users. Despite 9.6 kbps connection speeds, Japanese users are voraciously using their colour-screen multimedia phones to access a variety of content.

It's estimated that 56 per cent of i-Mode usage is entertainment-related. This includes games, downloads of unique ring tones and, surprise, adult content.

Joe Barrett, head of 3G market relations at Nokia Networks, said two million i-Mode subscribers pay the equivalent of $1 US per month each to download cartoon icons for their phones. They also pay connection charges.

I-Mode users also have the capability to download sumo wrestlers, which they train on their phones and then upload to their Sony Playstation video game consoles to do battle.
DoCoMo has announced that it will bring the service to North America next year, entering the U.S. market with AT&T.

The other hot technology that will give 2.5G and 3G some capitalistic oomph is messaging.
SMS or short messaging service is a feature on most handsets that allows the transmission of up to 160 character text messages between mobile phones, PCs and the Internet. It's similar to Internet chat.

In Europe and Asia, SMS accounts for millions of dollars of revenue for the wireless carriers. Sending an SMS message is billed by the message at about 30 cents a pop. It's estimated that 5,000 SMS messages per second are sent worldwide.

However, it has failed to take off in North America because an SMS sender can only transmit a message to someone on the same network. Fido subscribers cannot send SMS messages to Rogers AT&T subscribers, for example. Carriers say they are working on fixing that problem.

The other drawback is that North Americans haven't taken to typing text messages on a dial pad, even with smart technologies that guess at the word you are typing to speed up input. But the Europeans have mastered the technique.

"If you watch (Finnish) school kids on a bus, they send messages to other kids just a few seats down, " said Timo Sivula, Nokia's Application Manager for Messaging. Later, he said parents punish their misbehaving kids by taking their phones away from them for a week. "It cuts them off from their social network," he said, "and soon, they are hurrying to clean their room."

Next generation cell technologies will take that one further and allow the transmission of images, audio and text between phones. The technology is called Multimedia Message Service or MMS.

Sivula predicted that parents would be able to take pictures of their new baby and transmit the images along with birth stats and perhaps an audio message to grandparents.

Call it the birth of a new era.