Customer Reviews

The GSM Network: The GPRS Evolution: One Step Towards UNTS

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This book has in its title "The GSM Network - GPRS Evolution: One Step Toward UMTS." Well you would think that a good part of this book would be devoted to GPRS and how it evolves to UMTS. Count it, 7, yes only 7 pages on GPRS out of 227. So what do learn about GPRS? Almost nothing to write about. If you are looking to buy a book on GSM and are happy learning very little about any of the details of that wireless network, then by all means, this is for you. I've seen free tutorials that you can download off the internet that explain more about GSM and GPRS than this book does. For that matter, you can can learn more about the GSM network in some books that don't even have GSM mentioned in their title. What is this author thinking? Sell a book by dropping a few acronyms like GPRS into the title and not say much about it? Well, good luck with this one.

The subtitle of this book is a little misleading. It is a general GSM book that has been updated in its second edition to include coverage of GSM, WAP and UMTS and not a book specifically about these subjects.

This book covers all aspects of GSM cellular radio systems in a moderate degree of detail. It is more suited to readers who are working with, or studying, the technology than to those who are just interested in how their telephone works.

The breadth of coverage means that nothing is dealt with in sufficient depth to be your sole source of information on any one aspect of the technology. That does not mean that the book is worthless. Anyone with a professional interest in one particular area of GSM networks will benefit from having a reasonable understanding of the rest of the technology and that is what this book provides.

It is handy to have all of this material in one place with a coherent picture of how everything fits together and if you were leading a GSM project, you would probably feel happy if all of your team had read this book in addition to having in depth knowledge of their particular area of responsibility.

These things are however spoiled by the quality of the translation from the original French. Despite his background in electronics, the translator appears to have little knowledge of the actual subject matter. This is clear in those areas where there is established technical terminology in English. The translation frequently uses a literal translation of a French term rather than substituting in the standard English term.

In other parts of the book, the translator just appears to have been lazy or careless or perhaps just not to have understood the material at all. Some sentences appear to be step by step word substitutions thus retaining a non-English structure with English words.

In particular, the translator appears not to understand the concepts of public key cryptography and the section on encryption reads like an undergraduate essay written by somebody who was asleep in most of the relevant lecture.

These things do matter as it just makes it harder read the book when it is necessary to keep wading through such poor writing and muddled explanations.

Finally, there are too many technical typos. It is unacceptable that a book such as this should give wrong frequencies for radio transmission!

Properly translated, this book would have merited four stars. As things stand, it only receives two.

If you are a cellular operator or work for any manufacturing company in the industry, don't bother to buy this book. It lacks the practical view required when deploying cellular systems

If you work in the cellular industry don't botehr buying this book !