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Vodafone Pins Hopes on High-Speed 3G Video and Music

Posted on: Thursday, 11 August 2005, 18:00 CDT

VODAFONE is hoping its new 3G mobile network, combining video phones, music downloads and faster data speeds, will help wrestle the initiative back from a resurgent Telecom.

The network, costing more than $200 million, extends to 19 main centres, which together account for 36 per cent of the population, including Wellington, Hastings, Napier, Palmerston North and Wanganui.

Its video-calling facility means customers can see each other on screen when making a phone call if both have a 3G handset and point them toward their face when speaking.

Vodafone managing director Russell Stanners said video calls would cost no more than mobile calls.

Vodafone retailers are stocking five different 3G-capable handsets, ranging in price from $749 to $999. All double as MP3 music players and Vodafone has introduced its own online music store with 300,000 tracks that can be downloaded directly to the phones for $3.50 a song.

A 3G mobile data card, worth $498, lets customers use the network to surf the Internet at close to broadband speeds. Customers can download at most a gigabyte of data for a flat fee of $132 a month, with plans for lighter users starting at $45 a month. One typed character uses a byte of space and a gigabyte is about a billion bytes.

Vodafone's 3G network is believed to be, at best, a third as fast as Telecom's T3G mobile network.

However, Mr Stanners said compression technology would make it seem nearly as quick. Vodafone's 3G phones are also capable of playing video clips provided by Sky News, TV3 and C4.

Telecom's fourth-quarter results showed it picked up 74,000 new mobile subscribers, almost double the 38,000 by Vodafone in the same three months to the end of June.

Telecom Mobile general manager Kevin Kenrick said Vodafone had only caught up to where Telecom was when it launched its original 1 x CDMA network in 2002.

He said experience overseas had shown there wasn't much of a market for video-calling. But Telecom could also deliver video clips and messaging nationwide to 027 customers.

Since last week, all Telecom CDMA mobile customers have been able to download songs to MP3-capable cellphones from a website for $1.75 each. Telecom plans to extend its T3G network to all towns with more than 10,000 residents by Christmas, bringing its higher speed service to 80 per cent of the population.

Source: Dominion Post

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