T-Mobile to Introduce UMTS Service in March

Mobile phone company T-Mobile will announced a service plan for its next generation of mobile phones, supervisory board head Rene Obermann said over the weekend. "We will introduce our service concept in March for the (Hanover) computer convention Cebit," Obermann told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. UMTS, the third generation of mobile technology, is more than twice as fast as GPRS, the system currently used in Europe. In addition to conventional voice, fax and other data services, it may also allow high-resolution video and multimedia services on the move, such as mobile office services, virtual banking and Internet access. T-Mobile competitor Vodaphone introduced high-speed UMTS service for laptop computers in Britain on Feb. 16 and said the service would be available in other European countries, including Germany within four weeks.