By Nancy Gohring
Special to The Seattle Times

Seattle finally has a high-speed mobile wireless data network.
Known as 3G, or third-generation wireless service, the network has been in the works for years and is now available in a few select cities. I decided to find out if AT&T Wireless’ 3G service, called UMTS and recently introduced in the Seattle area, could possibly live up to the hype.

The third generation succeeds the first-generation cellular networks’ analog voice service and the second generation’s digital voice and some basic data offerings.

More recently, carriers including Redmond-based AT&T Wireless have offered some faster speed data services known as 2.5G that are comparable to dial-up Internet connections on a computer. 3G promises to deliver true broadband connections to phones and laptop personal computers.

AT&T Wireless offers the service in six markets. On Monday, Verizon Wireless is introducing a similar 3G service in 11 new markets (Seattle is not one), in addition to three existing markets. AT&T Wireless’ offering is the only one in Seattle.

It would be tough for any 3G offering to live up to expectations set by the wireless industry. Carriers and phone makers have been talking for years about how 3G would change our lives.

With such high-speed wireless data networks, it was said, we would all soon use our phones to watch streamed television programs, conduct video conferences, wirelessly play games with competitors on the other side of the country, browse the Internet as quickly and easily as at our desktops and watch live concerts.

Some promises are true

AT&T Wireless is offering two phones, one from Motorola and one from Nokia, as well as a PC card that can be used in a laptop for Internet connectivity. I tried out the Motorola phone and the data card to find out if some of the promises could be true.

Surprisingly, some are. For example, AT&T Wireless UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) phone users can subscribe to Real-rTV, a service from Real Networks that offers an on-demand video news service.

I watched ABC News clips, popular movie trailers and music news from Rhapsody, the digital music service. I happened to be using the phone during the Olympics and Real-rTV offered a package of special coverage that included daily video highlights, medal count listings and short clips about athletes.

As part of the Real-rTV offering, I also listened to NPR programs, watched clips from the Weather Channel, caught up on sports news with Fox Sports clips and heard my horoscope read to me.

The video and audio services worked remarkably well. They are actually streamed, rather than downloaded first, and I found it worked better than streaming video to my PC often works. Once, when I was slightly out of range, the video came through a bit garbled but when I moved back into range it worked just fine.

I never had to wait mid-video while the stream paused to buffer, as I almost always do when watching videos on my PC.

I noticed a couple of minor content-related glitches that will likely get worked out over time. It appeared that the NPR clips have a set time limit. One clip I listened to ended mid-sentence as if the time was up.

Another time, I watched a music news clip from Rhapsody and at the very end caught a blooper of the newscaster joking with someone off-camera. Also, while the Rhapsody news item was supposed to be updated daily, the clip was often several days old.

Weighing the value

I found it fun and easy to watch the clips and didn’t run out of new and interesting videos to watch, but I’m not convinced that I would pay for the service. (Real charges $4.95 per month to watch the videos.)

While the content could be worth the extra investment for some users, much of it can be found via news clips readable on the phone via the Internet as part of AT&T Wireless’ regular mMode monthly subscription. UMTS customers pay $24.99 for unlimited access to mMode, which includes basic Internet access plus special mobile data services.

Also, the Motorola phone, which retails for $299 (as does the Nokia), underwhelmed me. It was clunky to operate. The handset, for instance, features a toggle button that can be pushed up and down or side to side to scroll through menus and then pressed to select something. I found that it only sometimes worked at selecting an item. I would instead have to hit a separate button that corresponded to a «select» command on the screen.

The phone was also slow at registering movements of the button and my frustration with the shortcoming didn’t make it any easier to use. Sometimes when I’d press the toggle button down to reach the next item on a menu, nothing would happen. Instead of patiently waiting for the phone to catch up, I’d hit down again and again. When the phone would finally respond, I’d find my cursor had moved several lines below the item I was targeting.

The phone I used came with headphones to keep from disturbing people around me. Otherwise, the phone’s speaker is on the back, an inconvenient place.

Nice screen size

The phone does have some upside. While at first glance it seems huge, especially compared with most available cellphones, the screen had just the right dimensions to get a good experience watching videos.

In addition to all the services based on the high-speed wireless network, the phone has plenty of other bells and whistles. It includes a camera, but with a neat feature for taking pictures of yourself. Users can switch the screen view so that if you’re taking a picture of yourself, you can see yourself — and what the photo will look like — in the screen.

The phone also includes a video camera. I took a few short videos and transferred them to a laptop via infrared and e-mail.

In the future, AT&T Wireless could start offering video conferencing to users of this phone. The phone has a dedicated video call key, which an AT&T Wireless spokesman said is for video calls, though such a service hasn’t been enabled. He was mum as to whether the carrier plans to turn it on in the future.

By purchasing an extra cable, users of the Motorola phone can connect the handset to a laptop for Internet access. My AT&T Wireless contact preferred that I try the dedicated data card instead so I borrowed a Novatel PC card.

The card costs $149.99 with a two-year agreement plus $79.99 a month for unlimited use.

Oddly, I found that coverage was far more limited on the data card than on the phone. With the phone, I received a strong 3G connection in my house near Green Lake, in locations around town and as far north as Mukilteo.

But I couldn’t use the data card in my house. In fact, I thought I was having a more complicated problem when I first tried out the card because I didn’t know when I wasn’t connected. I would open the connection-manager software that comes with the Novatel card and press connect. The software would show that I was connected to a signal of three of four bars of coverage. But no matter what Web page I tried, I’d get a message saying that the page couldn’t be opened.

After a few days, during a moment when I was about to give up trying, the connection manager went from three bars to none in the blink of an eye. Then it completely disconnected.

No special message popped up to notify me that I wasn’t connected. I realized then that I had not been able to open any Web site because I wasn’t actually connected to the Internet. I would have to hit the connect button again and then try again to open a Web page.

I soon figured out that even though the connection-manager software sometimes showed I had coverage when I used the card at my house, I could almost never actually open a Web page. And when I could, I would soon be disconnected.

A few good results

I got mixed results elsewhere around town, but when I could find a strong connection, the service was great. On the shores of Green Lake, I used a popular bandwidth meter to clock my connection speed at 338 kilobits per second, which is even faster than my 256 kilobits per second DSL connection at home.

In a couple of locations in Belltown, I found connections of 293 kilobits per second and 247 kilobits per second. At the top of Queen Anne Hill, I clocked 329 kilobits per second.

I wasn’t always so lucky, though. I tried to get online from a number of locations in Wallingford, including on 45th Street and never succeeded in connecting. Heading up the hill on Queen Anne Avenue, I also couldn’t get a connection.

I can’t imagine why coverage seemed more spotty on the data card than on the phone, and neither could an AT&T Wireless technical manager. Perhaps it’s a better idea to use the phone as a modem, connecting it to a PC to get online.

While I was more pleased with my experience using the phone than with the PC card, I was generally impressed by my experience with the first 3G service in Seattle. I suspect that with time, the phones will shrink, coverage will improve, prices will fall and additional, unique offerings will be available for 3G phone users.

Nancy Gohring, a Seattle freelancer, writes frequently about telecommunications and wireless developments.