The purpose of this report is to look in more detail at the actual capital expenditures that 3G operators can be expected to make. We show that costs will be very much lower than expected. This is because most operators will be able to offer a good service to large numbers of customers by installing relatively few base stations. This is excellent news for operators, but infrastructure vendors such as Ericsson and Nokia will see much lower volumes of equipment orders than most analysts are projecting. The evidence for our conclusions is derived both from an analysis of actual 3G infrastructure orders and from an analysis of theoretical capacity.

We see European handset shipments down from 140-150 million in 2000 to 100 million in each of the next two years.

By contrast, NTTDoCoMo is putting its money firmly behind mobile data. Its investment plans in Japan provide capacity for huge amounts of data transmission. Three years from now, NTTDoCoMo will have invested, it says, 1 trillion yen (10bn Euros, if our maths is correct) in obtaining 6 million 3G customers. This investment, it says, will be enough to handle over 15m subscribers and provide coverage of 97% of the population. The major services it mentions as needing 3G bandwidth are music downloads and 'image clipping'.

Oftel appears to believe that such an arrangement would be acceptable if it 'allowed the delivery of 3G services earlier and at lower prices' than would otherwise be the case. It notes that the 3G licences do not ‘a priori exclude infrastructure sharing’ and that some forms of sharing, e.g. masts, are positively encouraged.

The Orange Prospectus

We have forecast that the increase in the number of users during the whole of 2001 will be as follows

Broadband update document.