The future of third generation (3G) mobile data services looks more assured following recent announcements from Hutchison 3G, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Hutchison 3G has started a limited rollout of its fledgling 3G service, with between 500 and 1,000 handsets issued to selected customers in the UK and Italy. Nokia is testing its dual-mode 3G/GSM handsets, announced last month, for interoperability with other handsets, networks and applications, while Ericsson has developed a rival dual-mode phone.

However, it could be said that Hutchison 3G is playing catch-up to Manx Telecom, a subsidiary of O2, which has been piloting a 3G network on the Isle of Man for almost a year. Mark Briers, project manager for Manx Telecom's 3G trial, said that applications testing is continuing, and the new dual-mode handsets will need to be certified before being issued to customers.

"The key technical aim of the Isle of Man project is now to test applications and services over the 3G infrastructure and to test the integration of the applications with the billing system," says Briers.

Early stage

Briers says testing of both the infrastructure and applications has been fairly straightforward. "We haven't had any major failures within the network, transmission or handsets. We have upgraded the devices with software releases to make them more stable - in an early release we had some call drops during a specific application or series of key strokes, but I would consider this normal at such an early stage of the game," he says.

Briers adds that Manx Telecom and O2 need to test a wide range of client devices able to communicate over both GSM and 3G networks before launching any commercial service, either on the Isle of Man or the UK mainland. "A lot of device testing will be necessary before handsets are sold to our customers," says Briers. "We will not commence this work on the Isle of Man before we upgrade the network to dual mode (2G/3G) working and, indeed, a lot of the work will be done within O2 as well as on the island."

Based on the Isle of Man experience so far, it is clear that some applications work better than others over 3G infrastructure, giving a pointer to the type of services that operators may offer in the future. "All Web-based services are working well, and customers particularly comment on the speed of browsing," says Briers, adding that other, more data-intensive applications were likely to cause capacity problems.

"The services that are not suitable include film clips lasting 10 minutes or more, principally because the scarce nature of the radio resource could result in reduced capacity where there are many customers. We would not, for example, promote listening to the radio via a mobile connected over 3G for a similar reason," says Briers.

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About Mark Briers
Mark Briers is project manager for the 3G network being tested by O2 subsidiary Manx Telecom on the Isle of Man.

His career began with BT, after an electronic communications degree at Salford University.