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

To: foundation who wrote (20224)	3/12/2002 9:46:20 AM
From: Dennis Roth	Respond to of 196654

Vodafone, MMO2 See Different Dates for UMTS Handset Delivery quote.bloomberg.com By Matthew Miller 03/12 12:46 Hanover, Germany, March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Vodafone Group Plc said it will start its new faster wireless network in Germany later this year with handsets from an unidentified producer, while MMO2 Plc said the cellular devices won't be ready until mid 2003. MMO2 won't start network services for the company's customers in the U.K., Ireland, Germany and Belgium until handsets are available for mass consumption, Chief Executive Officer Peter Erskine said at a press conference at the Cebit trade fair in Hanover, Germany. ``Our best estimate is that those will be available in quantity in the middle of 2003, and that's when we'll launch,'' said Erskine. ``What we don't want is to build a network that can't carry any customers, so we'll be watching those milestones.'' Siemens meanwhile said it will ship phones this year that use the faster technology, which is called Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, or UMTS. Peter Zapf, president of Siemens's mobile-phone unit, wouldn't name the customers for the handsets. The company will provide more information on the phones in a couple of weeks, Zapf said at a press conference. ``We're working hard to start our networks in the fall in the most important German metropolitan areas,'' said Juergen von Kuczkowski, CEO of Vodafone D2, the U.K. company's German unit. ``We have confirmation from producers that the handsets will be ready by then and we're sticking to our plans.'' Deutsche Telekom AG, Europe's biggest phone company and the wireless market leader in Germany, has said it will start its new UMTS network in the third quarter of next year. German Consolidation Deutsche Telekom's wireless unit T-Mobile International AG has in the past called for changes to the UMTS license rules in Germany in order to allow the six operators to buy and sell their permits. Today, Vodafone said it is opposed to such changes. ``We accepted the rules that we bid under, and our business models are built on them'' said von Kuczkowski, referring to the German auction that garnered 50.5 billion euros from the six license winners. ``A consolidation can still happen, it just has to mean giving the licenses back'' to the state. Vodafone D2 is Germany's No. 2 mobile-phone operator with 21.9 million customers, compared with Deutsche Telekom's 23.1 million German users. MMO2's German mobile-phone unit, which changed its name to O2 from Viag Interkom, has 3.67 million customers. ``At the end, I doubt that there will be six players, but we intend to be one of them,'' said Erskine. The CEO also introduced a new handset today called the O2 XDA, which allows customers to make calls and surf the Web with GPRS technology. Erskine declined to say who makes the XDA. Similarly, Vodafone said it will introduce so-called multimedia messaging services this summer with GPRS technology. The services allow users to send short text messages accompanied by color pictures from mobile phone to mobile phone. ===== And Nokia won't even let us see their 3G handsets until September 26th at 12 o'clock. DPR >> before tucking it back into his pocket. "This is a real working, dual-mode 3G handset. That's the last you will see of it until 26 September at 12 o'clock when we will launch it with our partner (telecom) operators," Vanjoki said. <<