3G crippled by lack of services

Consumer uptake of 3G services in the mobile phone market is happening much more slowly than expected, industry insiders have told vnunet.com.

Thomas Chambers, chief financial officer at Symbian, blamed a lack of services for the slow uptake. 

"We may have the network and the handsets, but people are still waiting for the services, be it TV, distributed content or internet applications," he said. "You've got to have network, handsets and services for it to work."

Chambers's statements follow comments from O2 chief executive Peter Erskine who admitted that the rollout of 3G had been a "disaster". 

Announcing O2's first-quarter results, Erskine said that the take-up of 3G services would only become "more meaningful" in 2007.

Chambers added that much of the frustration over 3G was because the technology was over-hyped for such a long period before the launch of actual services.

He pointed to Sky's rollout of HD TV as an example of what not to do when launching a new service. 

"I've got Sky+ at home and they keep bombarding me with HD services on Sky and when I asked them when it's available they said the set-top boxes weren't available yet," said Chambers. "I thought it's a bit early to be marketing it if the set-tops aren't ready yet."