Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Monday 23/02/2004
This week is Mobile Week - with 3GSM kicking off in Cannes and the announcement of a billion GSM subscribers worldwide, things have never looked better for the industry. Reports from Cannes tell of unmatched hospitality and corporate confidence at an all-time high - with something like thirty billion dollars a month coming into the industry from calls alone, people have realised that not only have they survived the bad times but they're positively prospering.

That may not be entirely true for the 3G people, who are still heavily in debt for mammoth licence fees and infrastructure rollouts and have yet to see the masses come flocking to their videophones. It's dawned on them that just having something fancy won't do the job: they need to compete on price with the existing networks.

One such attempt is 3's new ThreePay service, launched today. The PR phones our noble editor, Matt Loney, and enthuses away: one call tariff to all networks at all times, great discounts for higher users, set to revolutionise the market, yada yada yada. In fact, she continues, we have a report prepared that shows all this in great detail.

"Great!" says Matt. "Where on the Web site is it?"

"Um, it's not on the Web site quite yet. It's very new," says the PR.

"OK, well, email it over then."

"Can't exactly do that," admits 3.

"Is it available on any electronic format?"

"Not as such, no."

"So how do we get it?"

"We'll bike a copy over!" she says, brightly.

Matt counted to three, and politely declined. We didn't quite manage to write up 3's fabbo report for some reason, but as soon as the company gets the hang of this modern communications lark we'll be sure to bring it to your attention just as soon as the boy with the cleft stick is back from his lunch break.