Reality is hitting home hard and it is a thing of beauty: Expensive spectrum, beaten stocks, and false promises.
This charade is about over.
The frustration mounts...An Orange source said: "They said two mega-bits a second and it's rubbish. "I doubt it will be a fifth of that, even in test-beds, and in rural areas it will probably be a twentieth.'
Telecom Companies Admit to Exaggeration of Internet Service Speeds
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Publication date: 2000-08-27
Aug. 27--Leading mobile phone companies that paid UKpound 24 billion for licences to operate internet services now admit the system operates at only a fifth of the speeds claimed.
The new services, due in 2002, were meant to deliver data, including films and TV shows, to mobile phones 40 times faster than now.
But Orange, recently bought from Vodafone by France Telecom for UKpound 31 billion, now admits that speeds will never be anything like this, even under ideal conditions.
In April, BT Cellnet, Orange, One2One, Vodafone and Canadian-backed TIW paid more than UKpound 24 billion for licences to run third-generation services in the UK. This month a German auction raised more than UKpound 30 billion.
The big attraction was the belief that the new phones would receive video and bored commuters could watch films, or busy professionals could see and take part in meetings they could not attend.
But the claim that the networks will push data nearly two-thirds as fast as digital TV delivers on cable is wrong. An Orange source said: "They said two mega-bits a second and it's rubbish.
"I doubt it will be a fifth of that, even in test-beds, and in rural areas it will probably be a twentieth.'
Nicky Scott of the Ovum consultancy agreed there was no chance that the claimed speeds could be reached -- "not even in places with the most infrastructure and with no one else using the network,' she told Financial Mail.
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(c) 2000, Evening Standard, London. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. VOD, FTE,
Publication date: 2000-08-27
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