GPRS: Next generation phones hit shops

The consumer launch comes nearly a year after BT announced the world's first live GPRS network.

Since then, BT has only made the service available to businesses, amid a flurry of stories documenting the technical problems that beset it.

GPRS is widely seen as a staging post on the way to the launch of 3G services, and many of the problems which affected GPRS have begun to hit 3G, only more so - with problems over handsets and long delays to launch dates.

The main difference a user will feel is considerably quicker access to WAP pages and emails. GPRS offers an "always on" connection, so when it's working it eliminates the 30-second delay that users of WAP over ordinary GSM have to put up with.

The service will also be cheaper than GSM for heavy mobile internet users. At £199, the handsets are expensive, and the service comes with a monthly charge of £3.99 or £7.99. But individual WAP page views are very cheap, at around 0.4p each (though data is charged per kilobyte, not per page).

GPRS will also improve connections for remote workers, when the service is made available, by offering cheaper and faster mobile internet access from their laptops.

Data speeds are around 30Kbs downstream and 10Kbs upstream - slower than many white papers were predicting a year or two ago, but still appreciably faster than GSM.

BT seems to be gearing up for a slow launch of GPRS, in contrast to the massive advertising splash which accompanied the launch of WAP last year. There has been no advertising of GPRS as yet, and the company is believed to have a limited supply of handsets - though the official line is that they have "enough" to meet demand.

BT Cellnet's notorious ads featuring a little surfer riding on a mobile phone were widely blamed for giving people unrealistic expectations about what WAP could deliver - and fuelling the subsequent disappointment.

GPRS access will also be hit by capacity problems on BT's network. silicon.com has documented some of the problems early GPRS users have been experiencing with the service.

BT Cellnet can only allocate a limited amount of network capacity to GPRS, and when many users are competing for that space, they will experience serious contention problems accessing mobile internet services.

The first GPRS handset will be Motorola's Timeport 260, initially on sale from BT's own stores and subsequently from other outlets including Carphone Warehouse and The Link.