Universal Mobile Telephone System

Universal Mobile Telephone System or UMTS is one of the third generation (3G) mobile phone technologies. It represents the European answer to the ITU-IMT2000 (International Telecommunications Union-International Mobile Telecommunication2000) requirements for 3G Cellular radio systems.

It supports up to 2Mbps data transfer rates, although typical users can expect performance of around 64 kbps in a heavily loaded real-world system. However, this is still much greater than the 9600 bps of a single GSM error-corrected data channel, and offers the first prospect of practical inexpensive access to the World Wide Web on a mobile device.

Marketing material for UMTS has emphasised the possibility of mobile videoconferencing, although whether there is actually a mass market for this service remains untested.

Other possible uses for UMTS include the downloading of music.

There exists other proposals for the ITU-IMT2000 requirements for 3G systems besides UMTS like: CDMA2000 proposed under the American IS standards including 1xEVDO (up to 2 MBps data only), 1xEVDV (greater than 2 MBps with voice support)and other proprietary systems including iBurst from Arraycom, Flarion and wCDMA-TDD (IPWireless).