2G: Talking Digital
- Acronym: 2nd Generation Wireless
- Telephony: A term used to describe a cellular wireless standard using circuit-switched networks.
The potential for wireless telecommunications drove the industry to develop an improved cellular system. Advances in semiconductor and microwave technologies allowed the development of digital wireless. While the primary use for cellular was still speech transmission, new uses for wireless -- fax and data transmissions, and message services -- were becoming more and more common. In addition, the industry was responding to the security concerns of cellular users by developing fraud prevention and encryption technologies.
This next generation of cellular telephones, using digital technology rather than analog, was called 2G (2nd Generation). The technology was based on digital circuit switching, in which each conversation was carried on a single circuit, rather than a single channel. This allowed multiple conversations on the same channel, vastly increasing the capacity of the cellular frequencies.
The drawback to the technological advances is that there was no single standard; companies and countries developed competing (and non-compatible) standards. This meant that a global traveler would need a different telephone each time he or she entered an area with an incompatible system. One answer to this was the GSM cellular system. However, GSM was uncommon in the United States. |
