Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, or UMTS, is a standard from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) for 3G (third-generation) wireless communication networks. The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is part of the International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000) initiative from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and uses Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA) transmission technology to achieve higher transmission speeds than existing Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) cellular telephone systems. UMTS uses a newly licensed portion of the 2-GHz band of the electromagnetic spectrum.
One cost involved in the UMTS upgrade process is that of replacing the circuit-switched core network that connects existing base stations with an IP-based backbone network, which can be used to interface between the wireless system and the Internet.