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GPRS, also known as 2.5G, will allow the company to offer data services to its 1.6 million customers at speeds of up to 40kb/s compared with GSM data speeds of around 9.6 kb/s. "Today we take another step toward our vision of realising a world that is not just about mobile voice," Paul Donovan, chief executive officer of Eircell Vodafone said in a press briefing.
Initially the service will focus on Eircell's corporate clients, described by the company as businesses with around 50 handsets or more. Next month the service will be opened to consumers with post paid plans and Eircell says that this summer it will introduce a pre-paid service. Seventy percent of Eircell's customers are currently on a pre-paid plan but the company says that the goal of the Vodafone Group is to earn 20 percent of its revenues from data services by the end of 2004.
Some of the applications that the company's "almost always on" GPRS service will run include mobile e-mail, access to back office systems and functions, sales force support as well as games, Internet browsing and news services.
The company claims that it spent EUR100 million in its new GPRS network but despite the spend Eircell Vodafone is the last operator in the Northern European Vodafone Group to launch GPRS. Donovan, who took control of the business in October 2001, says the company will benefit from this situation by avoiding the pitfalls other operators experienced.
One of those pitfalls in some markets was a lack of handsets. Eircell has approved five mobile phones for use on its GPRS network and expects to approve more in the coming months. The approved models include the Motorola Timeport 280 (EUR199), Nokia 8310 (EUR279), Siemens S45 (EUR159), Motorola V66 (EUR279) and the Motorola Accompli 008 (EUR349).
PRICING DEPENDENT ON USAGE
With the service the company revealed its pricing plan, which unlike WAP or HSCSD (high speed circuit switched data), will be based on the amount of information downloaded, rather than the length of time users spend on-line. With "GPRS 5," the monthly rental fee will be EUR5, and the price per megabyte will be EUR5. With "GPRS 20" the monthly rental fee will be EUR20, and the price per MB will be EUR2.
WAP page viewing will also be charged by the amount of information downloaded at a rate of EUR0.0175 per kilobyte downloaded. The average WAP pages contain between one and two KB of content, which means that viewing most pages will cost users somewhere in the region EUR0.024 per page. The company said that the service was designed to meet the needs of Ireland's users and in the future there would be systems in place to help consumers limit their time and spending on-line. "This is not about us wanting people to run away with expenditure," Donovan commented.
Digifone, Eircell's number one competitor in Ireland, is also expected to launch its GPRS service to business customers later this month with a similar pricing plan. GPRS is often considered a stepping-stone on the road to 3G services or UMTS, the next generation of mobile services that are expected to offer mobile streaming video and incredibly fast download speeds.
Although 3G is still years away in Ireland, and in most of Europe, tests are underway on the Isle of Man and in Monaco and a full 3G service is already available in Japan through NTT DoCoMo.
Both 3G and GPRS are driven by the same aim: increasing average revenue per user (ARPU) of mobile users through data services be they businessmen or teenagers. In fact Donovan admitted on Tuesday that attention is being paid to applications such as multimedia messaging (MMS) for the rollout of pre-paid services. MMS and EMS (enhanced messaging services) are the next generation of SMS, a service that has proved to be hugely popular, and incredibly lucrative for content providers and telecoms, in Europe.
Questions remain about the success of GPRS in Ireland and across Europe however with special regard to WAP. Users who wish to surf the Net over their mobile phone or PDA, for the most part, will still be restricted to WAP sites which for the moment have not captured the hearts of the public in the same way the Net has. For this reason, some analysts speculate that GPRS may be doomed to the same fate as WAP in the consumer markets despite its high speeds.
Donovan declined to speculate whether GPRS in Ireland would invigorate WAP here, but he did say that the company was looking to third parties to help develop more content that consumers might want.
Following its corporate trials with partners such as Microsoft, Compaq, Logica, AIB and Glanbia, Eircell said that it believes its existing HSCSD service can work in conjunction for GPRS for the time being. In fact, Eircell admitted that its existing high-speed data service was on par with GPRS in terms of speed, but the company said it believed that GPRS would offer greater speeds in the future. HSCSD will remain in place for at least the next 18 months, the company confirmed.
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