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There are varied opinions about how long it will take for 3G phones

to reach the market, but it could be as early as next year, says Nokia's

Mark Squires. He tells Steve Barrett about the telco's launch plans.

Last year's auction of 3G mobile network licences led to operators

fighting ferociously to get one of the valuable bandwidth slots.

The UK Government happily pocketed £22 billion, and the five lucky

winners loudly trumpeted a future not too far away when we would all be

watching Hollywood blockbusters and our favourite football team's

matches via our mobile phones.

But 18 months down the line, a little more caution is evident. Operators

such as Vodafone are now only guaranteeing a minimum 64 kilobytes per

second for the transmission of data over its 3G networks - which would

make David Beckham's free kicks slightly difficult to follow on a

handset. And research firm Ovum recently warned the financial community

not to expect 3G services to be widely available for another five

years.

But Mark Squires, senior corporate communications manager for the UK at

mobile giant Nokia, is keen to dispel the air of scepticism that

surrounds the impending launch of 3G. He is adamant that the first 3G

terminals (that's phones to you and me) will be available to the market

in the third quarter of 2002. After that, he predicts that volumes will

steadily increase until the end of the year, with widespread units

available in the first three months of 2003.

"3G is on track for licences, network development and product launches

to the timescales originally stated," he claims.

Squires points out that users in the UK expect every telecoms

application to have 98 to 100 per cent coverage, which isn't the case in

the US or Australia. "But these applications will be available to

between 60 and 70 per cent of the UK population by late 2002," he

says.

He adds that the operators are being cagey at the moment, wary of

showing their hand and thereby encouraging the sort of ill-judged hype

that surrounded the launch of WAP. "They're waiting for 2002 before they

reveal what they have to offer," he says. "This time next year, I fully

expect there to be an explosion of launches and services. The network

operators are not novices. They know exactly what they're doing and they

wouldn't have invested so heavily in 3G if they didn't think they could

get that money back."

Squires says that the challenge for companies that have placed their

bets on a profitable 3G future is to find applications that will have

the same effect on users that SMS has had. "Live football will not be

the thing that drives the 3G revolution," he explains. "We're more

likely to listen to the radio via a handset, and have the facility to

download highlights to view them if we want to."

Similarly, he thinks users are unlikely to watch films on their

phones.

But they might use fast mobile internet access to search for cinema

times and to watch previews of current films.

The advantage of 3G, according to Squires, is that files sit on the

network rather than the handset, thus freeing up the processor in the

terminal - or phone - to do other things. A video clip will typically be

about three-quarters of a megabyte in size, but it will be streamed from

the network.

"You can do most things with 128kb speeds," claims Squires. "There are

no hardware problems with rolling out 3G services.

If you only need 128 kilobytes per second to provide effective services,

think what you can do with the rest of the pipe. In truth, two megabytes

per second was never part of the plan. 3G will deliver content that

works, that people haven't yet seen."

Usually, mobile phone formats are rolled out to the business community

before they are let loose on the consumer market, but Squires believes

that GPRS represents the first time a consumer device has been released

before a business one. He thinks this trend will continue with 3G. He

says the b2b market is still important, but that 3G is very much

consumer-led.

"It's not a minor or vertical market," he says. "It will be mass market

from day one."

For Squires, one factor that is definitely holding back the roll-out of

3G is the ability to construct a micro-payment system to charge small

amounts of money to the end user. Until now, credit-card operators have

charged a prohibitively high fee per transaction, which negates the

value of small payments.

"We have to wait for other elements to catch up with the hardware," he

says. "It's the networks' responsibility to produce a workable system

through partnerships, but the credit-card operators do now seem to be

coming round to co-operating."

With Nokia's chief executive Jorma Olilla promising that his company

will pump 50 million Java-enabled devices into the mobile market by

2002, Squires is optimistic about the future.

"You have to have the terminals to spark interest and encourage

applications," he says. "But 3G is moving the emphasis away from

hardware to an application focus."

And that's got to be good news for the end consumer.