OXFORD, United Kingdom—While Europe’s major cell-phone operators remain cautious about their launch plans for third-generation (3G) services, Hutchison Whampoa, which owns 3G licenses in the United Kingdom and Italy, has confirmed deployment plans for September 2002.
According to Canning Fok, group managing director of the company, 3G trials will take place in mid-2002 in the United Kingdom and Italy with a schedule to then offer commercial services within two months. Fok declined to forecast a target number of subscribers after full commercial services begin or what kind of content will be made available for the group.
Hutchison 3G U.K. will manage the U.K. operation and subsidiary H3G Italy the Italian operation. The British company is a joint venture with NTT DoCoMo and DoCoMo’s Dutch cell-phone affiliate KPN Mobile.
Hutchison’s confidence is in stark contrast to Vodafone Chief Executive Chris Gent, who claimed commercial 3G services will be severely restricted by a shortage of handsets that will limit wide-scale deployment until the middle of 2003. However, while asking the U.K. government to consider extending the terms of the 20-year license, Gent did announce that Vodafone had a target to trial 3G services between June and September 2002, with a public launch in October.
