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O2 Ireland is the first of the three mobile operators here to offer GPRS to pre-paid customers. Alongside the launch, the company will begin selling the newly approved Siemens M50 handset to new pre-paid users.
GPRS, which stands for General Packet Radio Services and is more commonly called 2.5G, allows users to download data to mobile devices, such a Web/WAP pages or e-mail, at much higher speeds than is available through GSM (2G) services. Moreover, GPRS users are charged by the amount of information they download, not for how long they stay on-line, as is the case with 2G.
O2's pre-paid services will cost users EUR0.03 per 1kb downloaded, which equates to 1 WAP page on average. To interest new users, the company said it will offer free GPRS access to pre-paid customers until the end of October.
With the launch of pre-paid GPRS, Irish consumers of all types, from business users to pre-teenagers, now have access to high-speed mobile data services for the first time. And although the market for GPRS across Europe has improved, the industry still has a way to go before it can claim success in its high-speed data offerings.
"The GPRS situation is better now than it was at the start of the year," explained Lars Vestergaard, IDC research manager for European wireless and mobile markets. "At least now you are seeing a price next to a GPRS service," he added. In fact at the end of 2001, GPRS takeup was widely regarded as dismal, due mainly to billing problems, technical issues, a lack of handsets and no compelling content.
Some GPRS handset manufacturers had predicted that they would ship 10 million handsets by the end of 2001, but the actual figure was just over 7 million. And in the early months of this year in Sweden, only around one in 10 new subscribers selected GPRS despite aggressive discounting by operators.
But Vestergaard said that with many of the billing and technical issues now resolved, and marketing spend on the rise, the situation has improved. Soon more sophisticated hybrid billing options will be available where some services are post-paid and others are pre-paid. "But there is still a lack of content," he added, "operators need to come up with content that is really compelling, really addictive applications to get GPRS off the ground."
O2 Ireland's GPRS product manager Tony Dempsey said the company would offer WAP services to consumers as part of GPRS here. He admitted that WAP had been a disappointment under GSM, but felt that with the higher speed of the new service more consumers would be interested.
But two additional products that users will see from O2 in the coming months will be GPRS games and MMS, Dempsey added, services that Vestergaard says offer far more promise than WAP.
MMS, an advanced type of SMS, has been called the killer app for next generation mobile networks. But expectations for this service may be too high as well. A new forecast from the Wireless World Forum says that revenues from Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) will be much lower than predicted, at only USD5.8 billion by 2006 in 16 key markets around the globe.
This figure is much lower than some "wild" forecasts of as much as USD50 billion per annum. Moreover, "unless there is a greater understanding of consumer lifestyle needs and how they adopt, experiment and eventually assimilate technology, MMS will under perform," WWF said.
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