It has taken so long for 3G to become a commercial reality that you would have thought all the details would have been sorted out by now, that the technology evolution would be clear-cut and predictable. But, the future is still being shaped by a present for which no one in the wireless industry may have been fully prepared.

Voice over IP (VoIP), a decade-old concept that many people never thought would enjoy mainstream success, has begun an arc toward mass-market acceptance in the last year that is affecting not only the traditional network architecture notions of the wireline industry but also the 3G evolutionary path of the wireless sector.

Most notably, VoIP has proved — and proves to a greater extent every day — the viability of transporting voice traffic over data channels, rather than requiring separate channels. In the world of CDMA-based networks, this has thrown the 3G evolutionary plan for a loop because many carriers deploying CDMA 1X EV-DO thought they eventually would have to adopt a later standard, EV-DV, before they could efficiently and cost-effectively combine voice and data on the same architecture. Now, market trends and the ongoing development of EV-DO revision A, which supports VoIP, are changing the course of 3G, and EV-DV may be falling by the wayside.

If 3G remains a work in progress, then 4G has yet to be defined — and could stay that way. Companies that are commonly thought of as being the innovators of alternatives to today's mainstream mobile technologies for the last few years have been grouped into a ‘4G’ technology camp, but it's a moniker none of them want to embrace.

Why should they, when their technologies already have been deployed commercially worldwide or are evolving at the similar or quicker pace to a 3G solution like EV-DO revision A? Rather, a company like ArrayComm eschews a 4G label that it says is redundant to 3G, for smart antenna technology that is network-agnostic. IPWireless states a fairly strong case for how its technology is simply a somewhat different take on the 3G UMTS standard. Flarion Technologies also touts what sounds more like a 3G alternative — orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, or OFDM. Navini's network evolution ideas revolve around the emerging 802.16 mobile WiMAX standard.

If we're looking to chart a clear, predictable course for mobile network evolution, we're as out of luck now as we always have been. Our traditional ideas about 3G evolve and change as the market dictates, and we have to learn the lesson that the decisions we make could easily be unmade by the whims of users. As for 4G — we'll let's just call it all 3G until there's a real reason to do otherwise.