3G services used rarely, if at all

Use of 3G services is still low, according to a recent survey, though telecoms operators predict that improvements to applications and keener pricing will make the technology more popular.

Research firm YouGov, commissioned by self-service systems provider Netonomy, found that 73 percent of people with 3G phones rarely use 3G services, and over a quarter do not use them at all.

Meanwhile, 79 percent of those questioned said that mobile services were getting more complex, nearly 10 percent up from last year.

However at last week's 3GSM conference in Barcelona, there were signs that these issues are being addressed. Antonio Vianna-Baptista, chairman and chief executive of Telfónica Móvile, said 3G in Europe has not yet come of age and more could be done to improve the experience of customers.

Arun Sarin, chief executive of Vodafone, agreed and said that operators need to make 3G systems simpler for users. He added that keener pricing for 3G may also attract more interest.

"About 75 percent of calls go by wireline, so we have to look at the price of mobile minutes," he said. He added that the price of 3G is falling by about 10 percent each year.

The question for telecoms carriers that have spent billions on 3G licences is how to generate additional revenue from the faster technology. Companies such as comms services vendor Fastmobile may hold the answer for some of them. "One of the things we hear from carriers who get requests from customers to implement a particular application is that there's no integration across the platform," said Fastmobile's sales and marketing director, John O'Boyle. "It's not 3G that's complicated, it's the applications and services."

In the meantime, sales of 3G kit are growing. In YouGov's survey of almost 2,000 consumers, the percentage of respondents planning to upgrade to 3G doubled to eight percent this year.

And a recent report from analyst company Analysys, titled Prospects for the Evolution of 3G and 4G, suggests 3G technology still has room for improvement. It says that forthcoming systems for 3G Long Term Evolution (LTE), or "Super 3G ", could adopt many of the techniques of alternative technologies such as WiMax to achieve downstream data rates of 100Mbit/s.