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Despite telecoms companies having paid £22.5 billion last week for
licences to run the next generation of mobile phone services in Britain, the
five new networks may be overtaken by existing services. The new “3G” services
will use an international standard that can deliver data at 2 megabits per
second. But to achieve reliable reception, most 3G mobiles will work at 144
kilobits per second. Meanwhile, existing cellphone networks will soon offer a
system called GPRS which exploits the stop-start nature of Internet data and
boosts its data rate to 114 kilobits when needed by combining several
channels.