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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis Roth who wrote (19258)	2/19/2002 10:36:59 AM
From: Dennis Roth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 196444

Orange, Bouygues Tel trumpet first GPRS services biz.yahoo.com ==== Still blaiming lack of handsets for both delays in GPRS and UMTS. I thought GPRS was supposed to be available to the masses last year. DPR ===== By Catherine Bremer CANNES, France, Feb 19 (Reuters) - European mobile giant Orange and its smaller French rival Bouygues Telecom trumpeted their long-awaited rollout of fast mobile Internet services at an industry congress on Tuesday. But while Orange boasted it would be selling GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) to the mass market in the second quarter of this year, a more cautious Bouygues Telecom warned that differences between mobile handsets would hold the market back. GPRS phones run at three times the speed of today's tediously slow Internet phones and have the advantage of being permanently connected to the Internet. Orange, a unit of France Telecom that is vying for leadership in Europe with Britain's Vodafone (quote from Yahoo! UK & Ireland: VOD.L), announced said it expected data revenues to double this year as a result of introducing GPRS. ``We are launching GPRS for businesses in the first quarter and for the mass market in the second. We are launching on time and with absolute confidence,'' Didier Quillot, head of Orange France, told reporters on day one of the 3GSM World congress. ``Our target is for the total ARPU (average revenues per user) for Orange France coming from non-voice services to double between 2001 and 2002,'' Quillot earlier told Reuters in an interview. Bouygues Telecom, a unit of conglomerate Bouygues and number three in France with 18 percent of the mobile market to Orange's 48 percent, said it did not expect to start offering GPRS to the general public before the end of September, given the lack of handsets with compatible software. ``2002 will be limited by the lack of terminals,'' Bouygues Telecom Chief Executive Gilles Pelisson told reporters at a dinner late on Monday. ``The big issue is standardising services, and as far as individual terminals go, we are here at Cannes to see which way the market is going,'' he said. Bouygues launched its first GPRS services to businesses in late January, entering a new market where it aims to bite into Orange's 65 percent share in corporate mobile services. MOOD SUBDUED Investors have lost patience with delays in the roll-out of high-speed mobile Internet and multimedia services. They had pushed stocks in mobile operators to peak levels in 1999 and 2000, when analysts hyped the future benefits of the third-generation (3G) mobile Internet, then watched them fall last year as companies pushed back launch dates for the new services. GPRS was initially supposed to be in operation last year. It runs on existing phones but at faster speeds, thus offering a glimpse of the capabilities promised by the even faster 3G technology expected in 2004. Orange's new GPRS services can run on Motorola (NYSE:MOT - news) handsets and are in the testing stage with phones from Ericsson. Quillot said that of 20 cellphones featured in Orange's imminent new phone catalogue, nine will be GPRS phones and three will feature large colour screens. But Orange's early GPRS services will not initially include the multimedia messaging services that industry watchers say will be the ``killer application'' of 3G phones and generate much of the expected new revenue. Orange's GPRS services, featuring customised Web portals and on-the-road email, are set to go live in Britain and France this week and in Belgium, Switzerland and Denmark in the weeks ahead. The company said it hoped its June 2002 phone catalogue would offer MMS services. Bouygues, while seeming the slow but steady tortoise in the race against the eager Orange hare, has signed up Israeli tech start-up Comverse (NasdaqNM:CMVT - news) to supply multimedia messaging software for its GPRS rollout. ``We have signed up Comverse so that our subscribers will be able to send messages with sound, photos and video clips,'' Pelisson said. ``We are convinced that we will have terminals out to the mass market by October that will have mobile Internet services fully working.'' Bouygues is launching its GPRS services on Motorola and Siemens phones. As far as 3G services go, Orange has the advantage of holding licences in a number of European countries, while Bouygues has yet to decide whether it will bid in a second French sale later this year. Still, both operators said the services they were developing for GPRS could be easily transferred to 3G on dual-band phones. Quillot said Orange was still gunning for an end-2003 or early 2004 kick-off for 3G, but said the timing hinged on availability of dual-mode phones in large enough quantities for a mass-market launch.