Peewee 3G takes first small steps
But true national services are still years away
By Chris Nuttall, FTMarketWatch.com 2:22:00 PM GMT Jan 3, 2002
LONDON (FTMW) - Three "national" 3G networks have suddenly been sprung upon a telecom world that only expected a commercial rollout of these proportions in 2003 or 2004.
But then calling the networks national is perhaps stretching it a bit.
On January 1, the Finnish operator Sonera [US:SNRA, News, Chart, Research] announced the launch of its third-generation mobile network "in the largest four towns in Finland," meaning Helsinki, Oulu, Tampere and Turku.
They are home to around a third of Finland's population of just five million. But there are no 3G phones available yet and Sonera [DE:931213, News, Chart, Research] does not expect a wider scale launch until 2004 or 2005. See Sonera story
Three-legged 3G
The 3G launch on the Isle of Man off the North-West coast of England on December 5 was more island-wide than national.
Manx Telecom, a subsidiary of mmO2 [UK:OOM, News, Chart, Research] , is to offer 3G handsets to around 200 users but less than a dozen were initially reported to be in possession of the new devices.
While mm02 pulled off Europe's first commercial 3G network launch, the first truly national one to be up and running is in the principality of Monaco - all two square kilometres of it.
Monaco Telecom, a subsidiary of Vivendi Telecom International [US:V, News, Chart, Research] [FR:012777, News, Chart, Research] , became the first European operator to begin testing in an urban environment in mid-December.
"Monegasques have been able to make use of video and audio streaming facilities," reported Die Welt on Wednesday. The German electronics group Siemens [DE:723610, News, Chart, Research] has been providing infrastructure for the six-month trial.
Qualcomm in US launch
Another false dawn for 3G came with Qualcomm's [US:QCOM, News, Chart, Research] announcement on January 2 that 3G phones with its chipsets were now shipping in volume in the US.
But this particular Qualcomm technology is CDMA2000 1X, one that is incompatible with Europe's W-CDMA standard.
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This means single-mode 3G phones will only work on the networks they were designed for, making roaming both nationally and internationally unrealistic.
This is also why 3G national coverage in the major nations remains a distant dream. Indebted operators cannot afford to develop the infrastructure for complete coverage so instead have to rely on handset makers to come up with multi-mode phones that will work across the conflicting standards of WCDMA and CDMA 2000 and easily switch over to GSM and GPRS when these older networks are used to fill in the gaps in 3G coverage.
Dual-mode delays
Japan's NEC Corp is in the vanguard of providing the required technology. It has supplied the handsets for the Manx Telecom and Monaco Telecom experiments, as well as infrastructure.
Its 3G network infrastructure and phones are also being used on NTT DoCoMo's [DE:916541, News, Chart, Research] 3G network - the first in the world when it launched on October 1.
But NEC said last month it would not be able to deliver dual mode 2G/3G handsets until sometime between September and November 2002, compared to its previous forecast of shipments early in 2002.
The UMTS Forum of leading 3G equipment vendors and operators now sees a delay in the commercial launch of 3G in Western Europe by up to a year - to sometime in 2003.
So, despite its deceptive beginning, 2002 will be the year of peewee 3G for Europe where only tiny areas and handfuls of users will benefit from high-speed handsets delivering video, music and e-mail.
The big operators will concentrate on maximising GSM revenues and developing 2.5G GPRS services to tide them over till 2003...or 2004...or even 2005.
Chris Nuttall is a reporter for FTMarketWatch.com in London |
