european telcos are moaning. a lot of their hopes get dashed. whom of them would like to say in public that - after all their investment - they will stuck with voice services for a while.

wlan is out there right now, wap sucks but they want to stay with that. intel: "we have to live with it, because there is nothing better around." - do those people ever think that they need users??? (intel by the way is investing in wlan, as is microsoft. they support 802.11x but not bluetooth.)

chtml is used by japan and korea for their 3g versions. korea has already more than 20 devices out there, nothing is going without colour screen and java. and most important: it is working already. more than 1.2 millione subscribers. (source: jane zweig, shosteck group) the difference to europe: they don´t care about downgradeability.

korea doesn´t use umts, they use cdma1xrtt - oh well the european union hates that. now a lot of eu project have to present their work also on a mobile device, using wap, otherwise you don´t get the money. interesting, but i don´t think that will help.

mms (multimedia messaging service), the new baby, and dream of bringing revenues also has a lot of uncertainty in it, just because sms worked, it doesn´t mean people will send home a "picture from the beach" in the same manner. to get this in a good quality is too costintensive anyhow.

"a 3.5mb file, a short video, low resolution, would cost telcos more than 10$ to deliver in the 2.5 G world". again nobody is talking about the cost for the enduser yet. and, so jane zweig, nobody asks: does it make sense?

but those people already have a blue eye, so let them dream about 2010 - the new date of hope for telcos in europe: in a recent study you can find the following: "by 2010, total 3g services provider-retained worldwide revenues from all 3g services are forcast to reach $322 billion. this represents cumulative revenues of over one trillion dollars from now to 2010." (umts forum)

well, i think until 2010 a lot of stories will be told. some people prefer to talk about 4g already. whatever that should be.