3G, Why all the fuss?
UK currently has five 3G licence holders who all bid for these licences back in early 2000 during the Telecoms boom period. I remember working for one of the UK Mobile Operator who at the time said there existence and future livelihood depended on winning a 3G licence. This was before the Telecoms bust and hence you can see below the determination of all companies involved by the amounts they paid for these licenses.
Licence A: Three (Hutchinson 3G, TIW) £4,384,700,000
Licence B: Vodafone £5,964,000,000
Licence C: O2 (Cellnet) £4,030,100,000
Licence D: T-Mobile (One2One) £4,003,600,000
Licence E: Orange £4,095,000,000
Yes we are talking Billions of Pounds. Basically the companies felt at the time, the survival of their company was at stake if they failed to win a licence. Since then circumstances in the industry has changed and the market believes the licences were bought at far too higher rate. However the future of the technology is still believed to be a prosperous one and hence all of the companies awarded licences in the UK are investing heavily in building their 3G networks.
Three being a new comer to UK were also the first to offer third generation services but had a very disappointing start with poor network coverage, minimum handset availability and technical problems with the new UMTS operating systems. All the other operators weren’t in a rush as they had revenues coming in from their existing 2G services. Early this year we had Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange announcing soft launches of their 3G services with data cards offering speeds up to 384 Kilo bits per second (Kbps). Of course this speed is only for downloading hence if you want to send something to another device then you would have to put up with speeds near to 64 Kbps.
We are now approaching Christmas 2004 and we have yet to see any so called killer applications. Three are offering services such as video calling, location based services, live video clips and information bulletins such as live news. Except for video calling all the other services can be made available on existing 2G/2.5G networks. Even the video calling service is limited to mainly large cities where there is sufficient coverage.
Early this week according to various news sources, Orange was planning to hold off their 3G launch until early 2005. However today we here that Orange will be launching commercial 3G services to customers in the UK and France before the end of the year. The only company that is not making a big fuss over 3G is O2 but behind the scene I am sure they are also making preparations.
The future may be prosperous for 3G network operators but at this moment in time four years from the auction date, I cannot see the reason why all this fuss is made over 3G.
