GPRS
(General Packet Radio Service) The first high-speed digital data service provided by cellular carriers that used the GSM technology. GPRS added a packet-switched channel to GSM, which uses dedicated, circuit-switched channels for voice conversations.
GPRS works on GPRS cellphones as well as laptops and portable devices that have GPRS modems. Users have typically experienced downstream data rates up to 80 Kbps. GPRS is not the same as GSM's short messaging service (GSM-SMS), which is limited to messages of 160 bytes in length. GPRS was superseded by EDGE, which changed the modulation method to increase speed.
2G cellular systems combined with GPRS is often described as "2.5G", that is, a technology between the second (2G) and third (3G) generations of mobile telephony. It provides moderate speed data transfer, by using unused TDMA channels in for example the GSM system. Originally there was some thought to extend GPRS to cover other standards, but instead those networks are being converted to use the GSM standard, so that GSM is the only kind of network where GPRS is in use. GPRS is integrated into GSM standards releases starting with Release 97 and onwards. First it was standardized by ETSI but now that effort has been handed onto the 3GPP.
GSM | GPRS | EDGE | CDMA | UMTS | HSDPA | Mobile Standards
