3 shows 3G in action

 

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By Matt Whipp

Posted on 4 Mar 2003 at 18:03

With 3G operator Hutchison putting the finishing touches to its 3 service in time for when handsets are delivered to punters at the end of the month, we couldn't resist nipping down to a flagship store for a demonstration.

3 spokesperson Ed Brewster met us to run through the three handsets available and the services on offer.

While much of the media announced a fanfare launch of 3's service yesterday, there was nothing tangible about it, bar the handy date: 3/3/03.

Customers who have registered interest in a handset won't be receiving one until the end of the month, and 3's 3G network is no more 'launched' today than it was yesterday.

However, Virgin still sees the service, which won't be in general use for a few weeks, as enough of a threat to loiter outside the 3 shop in a bid to persuade the public that its more prosaic offering is a better bet. Virgin representatives even turned up at 3's 'event' last night to stymie the show, giving out condoms with the slogan 'you're safer with Virgin.'

But while the Branson brigade may have a point when it comes to coverage, Brewster pointed out that 3's current 50 per cent population coverage is just the first step on the road to a national roll-out of a brand new technology.

There is a range of services available, with the centre pillars being football, news, movie trailers and comedy clips. Brewster explained that these are downloaded rather than streamed, to avoid a problems where the customer has paid for the stream, but say the train they are on goes into a tunnel and the stream is broken. It also allows you to play clips back as often as required, although many of these clips cannot be sent on as they are copyright-protected.

They use the MPEG 4 format and take around 30 to 40 seconds to download for items that are frequently around 1.5MB in size. The quality is as good as you could expect, even impressive, given the screen size.

Compared with Vodafone's recent announcement that it would be making video clips available through its Live! service, the 3G technology really stands out.

While the 40 seconds required to download say the ITN news bulletin over 3G lands you a program lasting several minutes, Vodafone will only offer 15 to 20 second clips, but taking the same time to download over the Live! GPRS network.

Brewster thought this was optimistic on the part of Vodafone. He explained GPRS was never designed for video and that, for a network such as Vodafone's, which suffers from the happy problem of being filled to capacity with users, high volumes of voice calls (circuit-switched) directly eats into the amount of (packet-switched) data bandwidth available.

But the key element of 3, that Hutchison is pushing in its TV advertising campaign, is person-to-person videoconferencing. It's an expensive, but impressive, way to communicate. A representative at the Oxford Street store told us that the initiator of the call pays for all the participants - so a three way videoconference weighs in at £1.50 a minute. However, 3 has put together a range of clearly laid out tariffs that bundle a set number of video calls on a monthly basis.

The quality of both video and audio is good, although the frame rate dropped away on occasion.

You can see the type of thing you can expect here, in an MPEG4 video we took on one of the three initial handsets - the NEC e660.

Pictured is an image of the phone taken with the built-in camera.