Telefonica confirms Swiss intention

date: February 26, 2002

The Swiss unit of Telefonica, Team 3G, has confirmed its commitment to offering 3G services in Switzerland, but will start by reselling GPRS capacity initially.

Telefonica had, up until now, been silent about its Swiss unit's plans, but following the shelving of Ipse2000's mobile internet plans in Italy this is perhaps an effort by the Spanish group to re-establish faith amongst the stock market.

The silence combined with an absence of any network buildout deals being announced and the Italian example had made local market analysts believe that Telefonica had abandoned all hope of starting a service in Switzerland. However, Lars Reichelt, Team 3G's chief executive, said the company would follow the example set by Telefonica's German 3G license holder Quam and start offering GPRS this year by renting capacity from other carriers. Reichelt also said that the unit would later move on to 3G, but gave no specific timeframe.

Reichelt said that the unit had so far remained silent about its plans as it did not want to raise customer expectations to levels that it would later be unable to meet.

He went on to say that his team had been working hard on analysing future market demands and on developing services that will attract subscribers. On the subject of the market potential Reichelt said there was sufficient room for all four license holders.

According to Reichelt, in the long-term, it was unlikely Telefonica would desire to remain as the sole backer of the Swiss company, which is still without a brand name, but he did say that it was far too early speculate on who the new partners would be.

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