3G Adds New Meaning to the Concept of Home Entertainment

By: Conor Ryan

Imagine you're in Kilmeaden and you decide you'd like to go to the cinema. So you activate your 3G service. A Global Positioning System (GPS) determines your geographical location. The service then accesses the Irish cinema database to generate a list of nearby cinemas such as the Ormonde in Dungarvan or the Cineplex in Waterford, and a user profile database to determine what kind of movies you like best e.g. Sci-Fi, Horror or maybe Thriller. Based on the geographical location information and user-defined preferences, the 3G service offers you a selection of available movies and show times. You then have the option of using your mobile device (laptop, palmtop, phone etc.) to view corresponding movie trailers through a video streaming service. Once you've chosen a film you can purchase a ticket through your mobile device and then all you have to do is get yourself along to the film of your choice and enjoy the evening's viewing. Mobile cinema ticketing is just one example of the kind of things that can be done with a 3G service.

By offering data-transmission rates up to 384 Kbps for wide-area (home) coverage and 2000 Kbps for local-area coverage (office), 3rd Generation (3G) systems will be able to provide high-quality streamed Internet content to the rapidly growing mobile market. In addition to higher data rates, these systems also will offer what the industry now terms "value-added" services supported by an underlying network that combines video streaming services with a range of unique mobile-specific services such as geographical positioning, user profiling, and mobile payment.

These types of service are the promised offerings of 3G and will have a deep impact on our daily lives. A Virtual Home Environment (VHE) service is another exciting 3G proposition. Imagine sitting in your office in Waterford Crystal and connecting to a camera in your kids' bedroom to watch them playing, on your computer screen or on your mobile device.

Better again, imagine you are driving home and while stopped in traffic on the Dunmore Road (unfortunately 3G services will not make traffic jams disappear but may help to alleviate them!), you can turn on the heating in your home to ensure it will be warm when you get home, you can also turn on the potatoes on the cooker and time the grill to come on fifteen minutes later so your chops will be cooked at the same time as the potatoes, two minutes after you walk in your front door. How do I know when the potatoes are boiling? or what if there is a fire?, you might ask. Don't worry, you can watch everything from your cookercam and furthermore, if there is a problem your cooker will ring you to tell you that ring four is malfunctioning and that it has shut it off as a precaution.
All of this is now possible and will be available to the general public in the not too distant future when 3G service providers have rolled out the services and supporting infrastructures.

So just imagine your alarm system ringing you to tell you that there is a burglar in your sitting room. You can sit back in the pub, connect to your sitting room camera and watch the burglar panic as you instruct your VHE alarm to lockdown the sitting room (double lock all doors, close electronic window shutters, shut off electricity to the room etc.), after you have contacted the Gardai. When the Gardai arrive at your home you can open your VHE front door and let them in. All this while still sitting in the pub! So instead of sitting at home watching the outside world on television, you can be outside, anywhere you like in fact, and at the same time watching your home.