3G

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3G refers to the third generation of mobile technology, or telephone technology. The first generation, or the "mother generation" was created in the 80's, and was mostly introduced with commercial deployment of Advance Mobile Phone service. The first generation was used to carry analog voice over a network, whereas 3G allows someone to access the internet, check email, social network, and many other things, if they are part of the 3G network.

The International Telecommunications Union ([|ITU]) defined the third generation (3G) of mobile telephony standards – IMT-2000 – to facilitate growth, increase bandwidth, and support more diverse applications. For example, GSM could deliver not only voice, but also circuit-switched data at speeds up to 14.4 Kbps. But to support mobile multimedia applications, 3G had to deliver packet-switched data with better spectral efficiency, at far greater speeds.

However, to get from 2G to 3G, mobile operators had make "evolutionary" upgrades to existing networks while simultaneously planning their "revolutionary" new mobile broadband networks. This lead to the establishment of two distinct 3G families: 3GPP and 3GPP2.

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) was formed in 1998 to foster deployment of 3G networks that descended from GSM. 3GPP technologies evolved as follows.

G networks offer a greater degree of security than 2G predecessors. By allowing the UE to authenticate the network it is attaching to, the user can be sure the network is the intended one and not an impersonator. 3G networks use the [|KASUMI] [|block crypto] instead of the older [|A5/1] [|stream cipher]. However, a number of serious weaknesses in the KASUMI cipher have been identified. In addition to the 3G network infrastructure security, end to end security is offered when application frameworks such as IMS are accessed, although this is not strictly a 3G property.

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