Five cellular operators in Asia have formed a roaming consortium aimed at GPRS and MMS users. MobileOne (Singapore), Maxis (Malaysia), Hong Kong's CSL, Telstra (Australia) and Smart from the Philippines named their group the Asian Mobility Initiative and said that in addition to roaming they will cooperate to develop applications. [CSL is wholly owned by Telstra. - Ed.]

NTT DoCoMo said it beat its revised goal of having 320K subscribers to its WCDMA service by the end of March. The company said it finished its fiscal year with 330K units active on its network, having added 138,400 subscribers in March alone.

8 April

On the heels of signing a marketing alliance with T-Mobil and Telefonica the head of Telecom Italia Mobile said that a wave of consolidation is about to sweep the European cellular market. Marco De Benedetti, in an interview with the New York Times, predicted that Germany might be the scene of the first mergers. "Most European countries can support only three mobile phone companies. The first two can make a lot of money splitting an 80 percent market share, and if there's one operator left, he can make a decent living. But if you have a situation, like in Germany, where there are three companies fighting for the last 20 percent, nobody is going to make it."

South Korea's minister of information and communication said that WCDMA services will be available by the end of this year. Chin Dae-je was quoted in a Seoul newspaper as saying that the 1X EV-DO "isn't enough to sustain competitiveness in the worldwide 3G market." Both KTF and SK Telecom have WCDMA spectrum licenses.

9 April

RIM announced that its Java-based handhelds have received the US Government's FIPS 140-2 security validation, thus meeting a fundamental purchasing requirement for many agencies. The company's Mobitex devices received the certification last year.

Broadband interest group WiMAX Forum announced that Intel, Fujitsu and others have joined the effort to promote the recently completed 802.16a fixed wireless broadband protocol. WiMAX, founded two years ago by Nokia, OFDM Forum and Ensemble, originally focused on higher frequency backhaul, recently expanded its interest to include WiFi bands. 802.16, first approved by the IEEE, uses microwave equipment to connect 802.11 base stations to fixed networks. WiMAX said it will also work with ETSI on the HiperMAN protocol.

Hutchison's UK UMTS operator, 3, is having its first sale. The company announced that it is extending its 50%-off introductory pricing through April and has reduced the price of some handsets to ￡125 from ￡400.

US wireless ISP/ASP GoAmerica posted a loss of US$55.9M on sales of $35.9M for 2002. The company said it had $3M in cash on hand at the end of March, having spent $2M since the end of December.

10 April

Microsoft has announced a software licensing initiative that will allow some hardware partners to modify and sell versions of Windows CE. The new policy, which would likely been unthinkable to the company even a year ago, applies only to devices such as PDAs, handsets and other products where the OS is embedded. Licensees will have complete access to the Win CE source code and will have exclusive rights to any modifications for six months, after which they have the option of licensing the modifications back to Microsoft. Analysts have speculated that the move was spurred by increased competition from open source OSs such as Linux.

We reported yesterday that Hutchison's UMTS operator in the UK, 3, was having a handset sale. In fact the English press is reporting that the company has taken to subsidizing the cost of handsets in an effort to spur sales.

The bad news continues to flow from US wireless ISP GoAmerica. The company's auditor to US securities regulators that it doubts the company can continue in business. Noting the company's continued losses and dearth of capital, WithumSmith & Brown wrote that GoAmerica "lacks the prospects to obtain additional cash infusions."

Nokia said it will cut 1800 jobs in its network infrastructure division and take other measures to reduce spending in light of continued weakness and poor business performance. The company had already warned investors that it expects its network division to report a Q1 loss. A Nokia statement said the company will closely examine its R&D projects and will likely reduce "product configurations."

11 April

Scandanavian UMTS spectrum licensee TeliaSonera said it plans to offer what it called its "first wave" of 3G services in Sweden in the spring of 2004. The company said that it still has to overcome "some serious technical problems," some of which are related to roaming between UMTS and GSM networks, before it can make services commercially available. "We have problems. We know what these are. What we need to do now is resolve all outstanding technical issues," said a business development manager.

Ericsson announced that it has been chosen to supply UMTS infrastructure to Hutchison's Denmark unit, 3. Ericsson said the Danish network "will be fully integrated with 3's Swedish network."