OXFORD, United Kingdom—According to one of the United Kingdom’s largest cell-phone retailers, Carphone Warehouse, less than 1 percent of the 170,000 customers that purchased General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) phones signed up for the high-speed service. The company said that while GPRS phones made up about 20 percent of its handset sales, only about 200 people had activated the service.
In what is reminiscent of the early days of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), operators are struggling to find appropriate applications that will stimulate interest in GPRS—a situation not being helped by reports that the high-speed data rates of up to 155 kilobits per second (kbps) promised by the developers more typically operate at less than 28.8 kbps.
This less-than-enthusiastic acceptance is echoed by a report from the marketing research firm Analysys that claims only 1 million Europeans had signed up for GPRS by the end of 2001, although 3.3 million had GPRS-capable handsets that could receive it. The firm said that cell-phone operators must give the same priority to GPRS traffic as they do to GSM and quickly bring attractive handsets to the market with an easy billing system if they want to grow the number of European GPRS customers to 40 million by the end of 2003. These customers, 13 percent of total subscribers, would then generate 26 percent of all mobile data revenues, concluded Analysys.
