German 3G site surprise summer hit - Government Activity

CommunicationsWeek International, August 14, 2000 by Joanne Taaffe

How do you think those brave few who have been left to man Europe's network service centers are making constructive use of the lonely August hours?

Many will be squeezing in an extra hour at the brasserie at lunchtime, or downing just one more glass of wine on the terasse before drowsily slumping in front of long-neglected expense reports. Others may be feigning online research, while checking out prices for the theater, or using the powerful office PC and LAN to download music from Napster. Or at least that is what your colleagues were supposed to be doing.

In fact, summer idleness seems to have given way to telecoms auction fever. One of the surprise online hits for summer 2000 is a site in Germany. The URL: http://umts.regtp.de-offers no false promise of illicit pleasure. In fact, its the live website for following bidding in the auction of spectrum for Germany's third generation mobile networks.

It hardly sounds like a must-see but, only days after the site opened, it buckled under the strain of visits and seized. The regulatory authority that is hosting the auctions was forced to call in KPNQwest to install a new server and replace the 2 Megabits per second pipe with a heftier 34 Mbps link.

No-one had expected the German telecommunications regulator's site to clock up as many as 500 hits a second. It displays little more than a simple, albeit well-constructed, list of mobile operators and the amount each one has bid for a German 3G license.

"To follow it live is really strange. Why should private persons go onto the Web site and watch auctions at lunchtime?" asked a puzzled spokesman for KPNQwest in Germany, who claimed his company got the site up and running in three hours after the crash.

Why indeed? There are no whizzy graphics and rapid price movement is not guaranteed. But maybe the spokesman has yet to work out how Europe's telecoms workers are really filling up their August schedule: Perhaps they are running sweepstakes on how high the 3G German bids can go.

As CWI went to press the total was DM 37.86 billion or [epsilon]19.36 billion.