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To: Eric L who wrote (2741)	12/18/2002 1:22:31 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9255

re: Erk! Erk! >> Erk! Erkki Gives the 3G Game Away! 18/12/02 Martyn Warwick TelecomTV It’s official. The EC says that 3G in Europe isn’t going to take off big time until 2008! Erkki Liikanen, the European Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society, interviewed in the German news magazine Focus, has let slip that the great and good in far off Brussels think that it will be at least five more years before there’s any boom in 3G handset sales. Just in time to put a damper on the industry’s Christmas holiday sales season, and to throw into a right old strop the Spirits of Christmas Present and Christmas Future, now lurking hopefully in Europe’s mobile handset shops from Limerick to Lesbos, Mr. Liikanen let it be known that, in his opinion, “the New Economy has produced plenty of hot air, and that has slowed investment in the telecoms sector”. Good to know he’s up there with his finger on the pulse of the industry and at the cutting edge of the news. Then to add an extra dollop of rum Nordic sauce to the plum duff of European despond, the EU’s top telecoms official added, “We will have to wait at least five more years for a real boom in UMTS”. It seems that Scrooge is alive and well and living some of the time in Belgium. Sure 3G has turned out to be more difficult technically than many developers and manufacturers expected and claimed. Sure operators went nuts to outbid one another in their attempts to get hold of a 3G licence. Sure there have been delays in producing 3G hardware and software. Sure nobody knows what the 3G killer applications will be. Sure nobody knows how much more subscribers will be willing to pay to use 3G apps and sure some of the early 3G handsets got so hot in use that they could easily have doubled as hand-warmers in the depths of a Finnish winter, but……… The new 2.5G GPRS colour handsets now coming on to the market are attractive, come with innovative multimedia applications and superb voice quality and can provide at least a series of subsets of Internet browsing capabilities. Furthermore, they should be stepping-stones to the real 3G services that are still slated to be introduced in various European markets over the course of 2003. Surely, what we need now is someone, whilst aware of the all the difficulties, is willing and able to champion the market, not talk it down further. Obviously that person, whoever he or she might be, is not a Brussels bureaucrat. Remember, those people continue to get paid and stay in post even as commercial companies go broke and many of those that do the actual work of developing, deploying, marketing new technologies and services are consigned to the scrapheap. Everybody in the European telecoms sector has had the worst of times since the industry began to crash and burn in the year 2000. And isn’t it traditional to be optimistic at this time of the year, to look forward to better times ahead? Well, I for one am expecting 2003 to be an improvement on 2002, if only because it couldn’t get much worse. And then there’s the fact that 2003 is the year of the next ITU World Telecoms in Geneva. If things don’t pick up for that, we may as well pack up after it. I’m told grape picking is a well-paid late autumn job, and that you get to drink some of the juice. << - Eric -