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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 (20141)	3/9/2002 7:12:01 AM
From: Dennis Roth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 196633

Vodafone ( Australia ) back flips on GPRS itnews.com.au By Richard Wood, iTnews Wednesday, March 06, 2002 Vodafone has done an about face and will launch into the consumer GPRS mobile market from March 11. This will be part of a general launch of the high speed GPRS service both in stores and the business market. In January a spokesperson told ITNews that Vodafone would not try to compete in the consumer market with a GPRS service, but would target the corporate arena. Telstra and Optus have been offering GPRS to consumers since late last year. Meanwhile Vodafone has been secretly selling GPRS to existing and new customers. We ve been signing up on the quiet and that has been going really well, said data marketing manager Mark Elliott. He said Vodafone had earlier held off with GPRS because the technology was unstable. We ve had GPRS rollouts around the network for eighteen months and I ve been trying to launch it every month. October last year was really when the commercial software was available and we weren t really ready to go to market with what we considered to be an unstable platform, especially bearing in mind the WAP experience. We wanted this one to work well and the user experience to work well from day one. And that seems to be good. It s now very stable and every customer we ve got signed up is giving us very glowing reports about the network. Vodafone has also been awaiting for handsets to arrive in bulk and now expects every handset sold to have GPRS from the end of this quarter - at latest by mid-year. Essentially it s like having a dual band phone. It will have GPRS in it anyway whether you want it or not. With the turnover of phones on a monthly basis we should have a fairly large market very quickly. Elliott says there will be no additional subsidies introduced to promote GPRS. The trend globally is to sell the phones without tying people into contracts and so a subsidy model cannot be used because people can cut it off at any moment, he said. Elliott said he has found from talking to around 500 Vodafone customers in the last year that the biggest demand for GPRS is for field service and sales applications. He initially expected email would be the biggest driver.