Vodafone denies rumours that 3G won't work

NEWS Vodafone has refuted press reports that its high-speed 3G mobile phone service won't be high speed at all. The company has denied that technical glitches will make it impossible to deliver the data rates initially promised for 3G services. The Financial Times reported that Vodafone had told analysts that the service would only be able to deliver 64Kbps, far below the 384Kbps usually quoted as the maximum data rate for 3G networks. The company said in a statement: "Vodafone confirms that all its 3G networks and will provide data services up to initially 384kbps and later 2Mb per second. These data rates will be able to allow for multimedia services including video and music." The origin of the 64kbps figure is explained thus: "The minimum service level guaranteed at the outline fringe area of a network will be 64kbps." In fact it is most unlikely that any users will get the full 384kbps, as bandwidth is divided between all the users in a particular cell. The wireless data service GPRS launched by Vodafone early this year has never come close to the 100+Kbps data rate, which is theoretically possible, scarcely exceeding 30Kbps. However, in practice, it is possible to deliver reasonably good streaming video over 64kbps, and there are few applications that actually require the top 384Kbps data rate.