Back in 2009 I published the first edition of my Beyond 3G book giving an introduction to the technology of wireless networks, capacity forecasting, mobile voice, mobile device hardware and also the software running on them. It's been a tremendous success so I decided to update it and publish a second edition with a slightly changed title to address the launch of LTE networks: "3G, 4G and Beyond – Bringing Networks, Devices and the Web Together".
It is quite amazing what has changed since 2009. Many of the predictions I have made at the time have become a reality and new challenges and opportunities have arisen. While LTE was only on the distant horizon when the first edition was published, it is a reality today and HSPA networks have undergone a significant evolution as well. New spectrum bands have been assigned and auctioned in the meantime and many network operators around the globe have since made use of them to increase the coverage and capacity of their networks.
Perhaps the biggest evolution over the past five years has been on the mobile device side. Mobile operating systems dominating the market only a few years ago have almost vanished and new entrants such as Android and iOS have taken the mobile world by storm. On the web and application programming side, significant advances triggered an update of this chapter as well and I've even included a section that introduces Android programming to the reader.
As a consequence, about half the content of the previous edition of this book was updated or entirely rewritten to reflect the current state of the art and to give an outlook of what is to come in the next five years.
It's been fun and, needless to say, a tremendous amount of work to radically update the book this way. But besides staying up to date in all the different areas discussed in the book it's been an interesting way to experience the change of 3 years in one effort. As always, comments are very welcome and I am looking forward to the changes coming in the next couple of years.