GPRS due in June

Johannesburg, 04 Mar 2002

MTN says it has moved into a "massive preview" phase of general packet radio service (GPRS) and that the long-awaited technology will be publicly available before June.

The generation 2.5 always-on GPRS is the final stepping-stone before third-generation (3G) mobile technology, and has major cost and speed advantages over the circuit-switched technologies currently in use.

MTN says it now has GPRS coverage throughout most of the country and it is previewing it to customers and partners. But it does not yet have an answer to the first question on most potential customers` minds - how an always-on, packet-based service will be charged for.

"We will announce the billing right at launch time," says Christopher Geerdts, GPRS product developer. "We have some ideas obviously, but this is one of our strategic advantages."

Telecoms regulator the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) must first approve any billing structure the company plans to use.

Geerdts believes high-speed circuit switched data (HSCSD) services, such as the MTN Datafast offering, will be cheaper for certain applications for the next two years. "The performance on HSCSD is better for some uses because of the way the call is set up. It would be cheaper, say, if you download a large file."

Cell C says it is adhering to its plan to introduce GPRS only towards the end of the year and that MTN is welcome to be the early adopter of the technology it is sure to sign up.

"We are focusing on solutions for the mass market on 2G phones, using messaging services which could work on GPRS," says the company`s chief strategist Paul Doany. "We believe in the mass market. I am firmly of the belief that if you lose sight of the mass market, your business case becomes very niche."

MTN plans to offer GPRS to large corporate clients as a means to access their networks remotely through what will have every appearance of being a virtual private network (VPN). "We will allow space for third-parties to add value to that basic offering," says Geerdts.

Doany says mobile workers do not necessarily need live Internet sessions to access data, but can often be better served by messaging systems. Although he says GPRS has a definite and secure future, he has doubts as to the stability of the technology, saying it has proven extremely complex.

MTN shares none of his concerns, saying it is satisfied as to the stability of its technology. The company does not have public projections on the expected popularity of the service, but says the interest it has seen so far indicates that GPRS will be pretty big.

"We expect take-up to be substantial in SA, based on both overseas trends and the history of data in our own market," says MD Sifiso Dabengwa in a statement.

Geerdts says the company is designing its systems for high growth, but even so new data services are not expected to put significant strain on the MTN network.

"The traffic as a percentage of the total traffic will be relatively small in the beginning, even if the uptake is quite high. Compared to voice traffic it will remain small."

Vodacom has set no definite date for the launch of its GPRS service, although it has demonstrated its availability.

"The Vodacom network is GPRS ready. However, Vodacom will not launch GPRS commercially until fully tested, compliant handsets are available in sufficient quantities," says corporate affairs group executive Joan Joffe. "We see no point in pre-announcing a service which is at this stage not commercially viable."