Customer Reviews

WCDMA for UMTS: Radio Access for Third Generation Mobile Communications

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book delivers exactly what it promises: a profound, compact and clear description of WCDMA for UMTS. The reader is expected to understand quite advanced concepts of mobile communications, hence it is not a good book for managers who want to know what 3G is all about nor for undergraduate students who want to learn cellular system basics. It is an excellent book for experienced network planners, protocol designers or research engineers, for example, who want to move from 2G to 3G. Simple test: if you don't know what are Erlang-B, orthogonal codes or layered protocol architecture, you want to study them first from another book.

Otherwise it might be somehow confusing. This book is a must for professionals as another reviewer stated but it is not very suitable as the first book on UMTS technologies. This book serves best as supplementary reading. For example new-beginner readers might get confused talkink about SIP at the first chapter before explaining W-CDMA and core-network layout. Anyway, this book contains wealth of information on UMTS technologies and warmly recommended for serious readers.

Whoever read the 3GPP standardization documents for UMTS knows how hard and time consuming it is to extract all the relevant information. Holma and Toskala's book is not just a collection of the 3GPP documents it is bringing light into them. Many plots of system simulations are given. It certainly helps you saving valuble time in getting up to date information about one of the hottest telecommunication applications nowadays. Read this book and you will understand the UMTS standard.

If you like to read standards or have to in the course of your work, this book offers a useful and succinct compilation. Other than that, there is nothing to recommend this book as it does not help improve your understanding. Then again, this is not the kind of book which people who do not have to work with standards will want to read.

There is a short chapter on cdma2000 at the end.

This book provides a good introduction to 3GPP Release '99 and helps you navigate the standard. The main focus is on the DS-CDMA radio interface. The book is useful for people with a knowledge of GSM wanting to know about WCDMA. If there is any weakness in the book it is the lack of coverage of Services & Applications.

With UMTS you must read what you can get - unfortunately what you can get is not aleays what you want - so with this book. Although the authors seem well informed, they are not god communicators - their explanations are alternatively trivial or incomprehensible, their diagrams, in most cases copied slavishly from the specifications, explain nothing. Perhaps this book is useful as a reference after the subject is comprehended. Comprehension does not lie here.

At last! A UMTS text you can read and understand. This book gave me enough detail to understand the standards and where they are going. The book has many diagrams and a list of all the features The features also have an explanantion of them in a language I could understand. If you want a 'quick starter' so that on Friday you open the book and on Monday you can 'speak' UMTS then this is the book you want.

This book is the only one available now about UMTS, which based on 3GPP standard and show you some simulation results of research. It is no doubt this book gives a full picture for a technical person who is interested in UMTS system. It is worth to start from this book and keep one as a reference, no mater how many books about UMTS will be published later.

Its a good book for starters and people getting to know the subject of wcdma and umts. But, the language is very bland and looks more of an ieee paper. Recommended for people who are indireclty associated with umts or similar products.

This book is a confusing compendium of completely unrelated contributions from what looks like manufacturer's warmed over sales brochures and power point slides. Every chapter is written by a different group of people and includes much repeated stuff. Most of the authors demonstrate a poor mastery of English as there are numerous errors in usage and lots of confusing ambiguity. The many sales photos of the Nokia concept phones are laughable.