British mobile phone operator mmO2 said on the eve of the opening Thursday of the giant CeBIT high-tech fair here that it is to launch Universal Mobile Telecommunications System or UMTS services in Germany next month.

Dutch rival KPN will follow in June.

Both come on the heels of Vodafone's roll-out of the new UMTS services in Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain last month, issuing in the long-awaited broadscale launch of multimedia mobile services in Europe.

UMTS, also known as third generation or 3G, is designed to provide email, high-speed Internet surfing and live sound and image broadcasts to compatible handsets or other portable devices.

But four years after telecoms operators spent fortunes on UMTS licenses, they are only now ironing out the last technical glitches.

Although Hong Kong-based operator Hutchinson Whampoa had a tentative start one year ago, making it officially the first of the new vanguard, its debut was marred by unreliable service and handset delivery problems.

The upcoming roll-outs now represent the beginning of a new 3G era, albeit for those the patience and the means to try the largely untested technology.

The offers announced by mm02 and KPN are aimed at professionals and feature a card to connect their laptop computer to the Internet or a company's intranet.

KPN's German arm E-Plus said it was "still too early" to put a price on the services, but O2 said the price tag of the laptop card at 285 eurosdollars).

Europe's biggest telecommunications company, Deutsche Telekom, is on Thursday expected to unveil its set of 3G services ready to hit the markets in the coming weeks.

The availability of suitable handsets has been one of the main factors scuppering the widescale launch of UMTS, long viewed as the holy grail of the telecommunications industry.

Mmo2's German unit 02 says it will not be able to provide UMTS services on mobile telephones until mid-2004. KPN is looking to the summertime as well, but noted "it depends on the availability of the handsets".

The main problem is that phone manufacturers appear to have their minds set on the December holiday season.

The head of mobile telephony at Germany's Siemens, Rudi Lamprecht, proudly announced in Hanover that the company would be ready to launch "several telephones" of the new generation "at the end of this year or the beginning of the next."

And market leader Nokia of Finland only has two models on offer, which multimedia vice president Mads Winblad assured "are selling very well."

02 chairman Harald Groeger characterized the UMTS race as a "marathon" which will "only become a mass market in the second half of 2005".

KPN is working on the same timetable.

"The mass roll-out is not really expected until 2005," said the group's head of mobile phones services, Guy Demuynck, with profitability still another matter.

But considering the king's ransom they paid for the licenses, which are still weighing on their balance sheets, telecoms operators have little choice but to invest in the technology and hope for it to pay off.

For all the attention given to UMTS at this year's CeBIT, the world's largest trade fair of its kind, it got off to an inauspicious start.

02, which hoped to wow visitors with a demonstration of watching film footage on a mobile phone thanks to the wonders of UMTS, gave up after two tries.

"It's the famous curse of the demo," shrugged the employee on stage.

SPACE.WIRE