The first third generation phone service to go live in Britain is 'three' from Hutchison 3G. Even though they have the most advanced phone system available, they've been struggling to get customers, so they have decided to compete on price. This is mostly good news for customers.

Originally you were expected to spend £199 on a phone that only works well in England's conurbations. You were then expected spend £60 to £100 per month making video calls (to whom?), whilst paying a pound per minute to watch jerky football highlight videos on a small screen. No wonder they have had to give quite alot of them away. Now however with their new Videotalk packages, calls cost 5p per minute or less to any network at any time. This really will put the cat among the pigeons.

Their problems started a couple of years back when the chancellor took billions of pounds for licenses for this 'new' generation of phones. Companies like Hutchison thought that they could gain ever bigger revenues from customers by offering more services and piled in like mad hares. Now they have to try and get their money back.

The portents were not good. Whilst Japan has seen a good take up of their video phones and mobile broadband services, the British have been ignoring WAP(2G) and GPRS (2.5G). What we want are small cute phones and cheap text messaging.

Problems remain for three though. The handsets are rather big, and get through their batteries quickly. When you get to the edges of the 3 reception area, it can take ages to roam to the O2 network. Video quality is good for downloaded clips but poor for video calls.

So what does it cost?

Send email to questions at callforless.co.uk
Last modified: October 22, 2003

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