3G is coming, ready or not, says the wireless research team at Instat/MDR.
Most of us aren"t ready - the EU reckons that the market in Europe for 3G services will start booming only in 2008. But InStat notes:
"While UMTS (WCDMA) has borne the brunt of the recent gloom and doom scenarios, it is actually being deployed, and generating manufacturing revenue, at a reasonable rate. It will continue to be deployed at an increasing rate as handsets become available and coverage deadlines advance."
But what about the killer app? Maybe there doesn"t need to be one, certainly so far as densely populated Europe is concerned. Here, the driving factor will "quite probably will be the need for more voice capacity to supplement the strained GSM urban networks. While UMTS is often portrayed as "expensive," the reality of the situation is that the hardware cost-per-voice channel is less than one-half the cost of GSM."