3G for the masses: Vodafone's launch of consumer 3G services is a major milestone for the mobile industry—but it's still business as usual

Telecommunications International, June, 2004 by Ken Wieland

With continued pricing pressure on mobile voice prices, operators have to devise strategies to increase minute usage across both 2.5G and 3G networks. "Making customers more aware of their voice messaging services is one way of doing it," says Simon Edwards, director of marketing (international) at Intervoice, a UK-based provider of converged voice and data solutions. "By providing missed call notification via SMS, for example, research [from Frost & Sullivan] has shown that there is a 40 per cent greater chance of a call return."

Handsets, too--as always--are going to play a vital part in the success or otherwise of the mobile network. NTT DoCoMo's 3G FOMA service, launched in December 2001, could only attract around 300,000 subscribers after the first seventeen months, before rising steadily to over two million by January 2004. It was only when NTT DoCoMo launched its 900i series of handsets the following month that growth really took off, going from 2.3 million to over 3 million subscribers within a matter of weeks.

Consumer 3G from Vodafone is here, but the early battlegrounds for increased ARPU will be strikingly similar to those seen in the world of 2.5G.

Table 1 Vodafone's ARPU history in Germany, Italy and UK

                   Registered total ARPU for the 12-month period to:
Country  Currency  Sept. '02  Dec. '02  March '02  June '02  Sept. '03

Germany  EUR       308        312       313        313       312
Italy    EUR       345        347       347        351       355
UK       GBP       282        287       292        297       297

Source: Vodafone

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written by Ken Wieland

Ken Wieland, editor (kwieland@horizonhouse.co.uk)