Iphone

Working PCs and the Internet I know that band depends from technology and hardware.

I have followed the story of how the home user could get more band through the years, first increasing modem power than with IDSN and lately with ADSL, and I can grab why we now may have theoretically up to 8Mbits on our home PC for a reachable price.

But browsing the internet I cannot find any technical information of how this is happening to mobile phones.

How can we get from 9.6Kbps to 114Kbps with GPRS first and then to 2Mbps with UMTS?
Better compression algorythms? More powerful mobile phones?

Iphone

I had a word with my brother. He filled me in on a few details. Just to get a perspective on those 2 Mbps: A GSM channel is 200 KHz wide (time divided by 8) while a WCDMA channel can be something like 6 MHz wide (code divided by a varying number of units). Quite a difference!