Fast Internet for nomads

Mobile Internet in Romania is pretty much the same as a restaurant a la carte: you have to enter it, sit at a table, order something and wait for a while until the garcon brings you (quite slowly and only one at a time) the forks, the bread and finally the food.

But we have got a drive-in as of Monday evening, as well. OfficeNet Access is the given name of the GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) service freshly released by Dialog.

The systems allows for Internet and Intranet access by means of a laptop and a mobile phone, and everything is done at much higher speed than the one of the modems in today’s mobile phones.

Considered “2.5G technology” by the specialists, the GPRS system is a transition to the genuine 3G ones, whose future is still only a project in many countries. Until such future comes, GPRS allows for data and voice transmissions within the area covered by the current GSM network.

The procedure used is packet switching – the mobile becomes a terminal that can be identified by an IP address, connected to the Internet and always ready to be used for web-related activities, the connection time is 2-3 seconds and the user no longer has to pay for the duration of the call, but for the amount of data transferred.

For promotional purposes, the service will start by being provided based on a monthly subscription with no traffic limit. Dialog promises 64Kbps in the medium-run and 128Kbps in the long-run.

The technology will be powerful enough for everyday work, which includes e-mail and web access (this goes for those users not planning to download MP3 files) to begin with.

To be possible to use, the technology requires a GPRS enabled mobile phone, a GPRS subscription with Dialog and for Internet access, as well as a solution to connect the phone to a computer (IrDA or cable).

The OfficeNet Access service will be available to a limited number of companies at first, because there is still some work to be done, but also because of the low supply of terminals in Romania.

The project aims to make this service available to all the companies this fall and to the people early next year. In principle, the speed provided by the GPRS technology reaches 171Kbps, but the limitations of terminals allow for no more than 30-35 Kbps.