Mobitex technology guide
What is Mobitex?
Mobitex is an always on packet switched wireless data sevice. Mobitex was originally developed by Ericsson, who made it an open, international standard. Mobitex is a narrowband, data-only technology most commonly used for applications such as interactive messaging (2-way pagers), e-mails, telemetry, telematics/positioning, alarms, and machine to machine communication (M2M).
Because of the proven robust nature of the Mobitex technology it is often used for used for mission-critical business applications. There are many reports of Mobitex enabled Blackberry email terminals being the only devices that still had connectivity during the recent terrorist attackes in the United States. Cellular phone networks had become overloaded due to the sheer call volume resulting as calls peaked when infrastructure had been destroyed.
There are now over 30 Mobitex networks on five continents.
Cellular phone technologies such as GPRS, EDGE and 3G allow higher data rates than Mobitex but are almost always competing for network bandwidth with voice calls. Mobitex networks are data only.
A detailed comparison between Mobitex, GPRS, EDGE and 3G data services will be added here.