Emerging Converging technology
Personal Broadband is a concept that talks about integrating the existing technologies to make it more usable, personal and ubiquitous. Its main concentrations include bringing technology in the hands of the user, seamless connectivity, better throughput and bandwidth. WiMAX and 3G, though are competitors, are being seriously considered for the process of convergence as they also seem to complement each other in terms of providing seamless voice and data service.
When observed, 3G service seems to be moving towards enhancing the data throughput and providing better data service while WiMAX is traversing towards improving better voice service. Thus both the technologies are moving towards the same goal, giving the user a single packaged service with all the basic and advanced requirements in a cost effective infrastructure. The concept also addresses needs the of the service providers in terms of providing the best service to their customers.
The other technology that talks about convergence is 4G. 4G is a fourth generation wireless mobile broadband technology which is expected to offer better end-to-end, high speed IP services with better throughput. The current throughput being concentrated on is about 100Mbps when mobile and 1Gbps when stationary. This technology is most likely to use a combination of WiMAX and 3G. The technologies that will be employed to implement 4G are: OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing), MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) and 3GPP (LTE) which is the Third Generation Partnership Project (Long Term Evolution).