Communications Regulatory Authority

service offers, for the payment of a monthly subscription fee, a packet of minutes for
calls to national fixed network numbers, made from within a radius of two kilometres
from the user’s home. Calls made from outside that area are, on the other hand,
calculated according to the user’s normal telephone rate plan. Lastly, there is the
possibility for customers to obtain a fixed network number where they can be reached,
which enables the caller to benefit from more convenient rates that those applied to calls
to the mobile network. In this case, the users, thanks to number portability, can give up
their fixed line and keep the fixed number to be reached on their mobile phones. At the
start of the year, T-Mobile launched a service called Mobile@home which is very
similar to the one offered by Vodafone; at the end of the first quarter, over 500,000
users had already subscribed to the service.
Similarly to what is happening in fixed telecommunications, faced with a
decrease in the average revenues deriving from the voice segment – owing to the lively
competitive process that has led to a reduction of the voice service prices and therefore
to a further increase in the dissemination of the service (in Western Europe alone the
total number of mobile lines has exceeded 338 million, a value that is decidedly higher
than that of the United States) – mobile operators are introducing significant
innovations that concern the data component, which presents very high margins.
In this regard, it is necessary to report the important results achieved by the
dissemination in Europe of the third-generation mobile service using UMTS
technology: at year end there were approximately 21 million UMTS lines activated in
Western European countries.
The transition to third-generation networks has improved the users’ experience
with regard to the use of mobile value-added services. Nevertheless, as of today, no real
“killer applications” connected with the use of this technology have emerged.
Among the services provided using the 3G networks which have received the
greatest attention from users, worthy of note are the possibility to download whole
songs onto a cell phone and to enjoy video and television services. For this purpose, the
operators have formed alliances with the content providers, including record companies
and television broadcasters. By way of example, there is the agreement recently signed
in the United Kingdom by Vodafone and BSkyB, which enables the mobile operator’s
UMTS users to view around 20 of the satellite operator’s pay-TV channels.
Nevertheless, the use of the third-generation network, for the purpose of
providing video services, is rather expensive for the operator (in terms of bandwidth
occupation), and proves inefficient and unsuitable, from the network architecture
standpoint, for providing the service to a large number of users. For this reason, the
mobile operators are investing in the experimentation of other technologies for
providing the service.
In European countries the standard being experimented the most is DVB-H. The
first experiment, already finished, was conducted in Finland, where it involved mobile
operators, equipment manufacturers, television broadcasters (Digita, Elisa, MTV,
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