Parliament Adopts Report on 3G

Europe EurActiv - On 12 February 2003, the Parliament adopted its own-initiative report on the full roll-out of third-generation mobile communications (3G).

Background:
The roll-out in Europe of third-generation mobile communications (3G) is experiencing a large number of problems because of the economic slowdown, financial debts of the operators, who had to pay large licence fees, and the lack of 3G devices on the market. In June 2002, the Commission adopted a Communication describing the difficulties of the sector and the financial, technical and regulatory barriers to full roll-out. In that document prepared for the Seville Summit, the Commission stated that "the sector is best served by letting the market drive the process ahead", but it also said that "public authorities can contribute to confidence by ensuring a predictable and stable regulatory environment".

Issues:
The Parliament adopted on 12 February the report on this issue by rapporteur Danielle Auroi (Greens - France). The MEPs endorsed the Commission's approach to let the market play its role, but asked for special attention to be paid to:

- concrete measures to encourage the use of open platforms, "so that consumers are not obliged to confine themselves to the output of a single operator";
- the building of infrastructure for shared networking;
- re-use of government information as one of the pillars of high-level content services;
- the debate on electromagnatic fields and mobile communications;
- security of payments.

Positions:
New research from Taylor Nelson Sofres, published on 10 February, indicated that 42 per cent of mobile phone users are interested in 3G services. According to the study, 21 per cent of all respondents would be willing to pay more for extra 3G services such as MMS, high-speed internet access and emails.

However, the study (which was carried out in ten countries) also shows considerable differences by country, depending, among other reasons, on whether handsets are subsidised by the operators, as in France or the UK. Alan Imbert, Senior Research Director of Taylor Nelson Sofres said: "The fact that operators in many countries have subsidised mobile phone handsets could prove a major stumbling block for the uptake of 3G in some European countries. If operators chose not to subsidise 3G handsets then users may be shocked to find that they will have to pay many times more for the new 3G models than they do for existing handsets."

Next Steps:
The Telecommunications Council of 27-28 March will discuss the Commission' recent working paper on barriers to widespread access to new services and applications of the information society through open platforms in digital television and third generation mobile communications.

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