No-one's Heard of 3G in the UK...

May 11, 2005 - source: BWCS

Bad news for 3G licence winners in the UK, five years after five operators paid out a total of £22.5 billion in franchise fees; it has been shown that 85% of the general British population do not know what 3G means. The findings fell out of a study by the UK telecoms regulator Ofcom which interviewed 3,000 people around the UK to test their attitudes to new technologies.

In fact the term 3G was understood by fewer people than any other technology on the list, including broadband, digital radio and digital TV. According to Ofcom's Consumer Panel, which produced the report, "The language used in the communications sector inhibits many consumers other than the young. Knowledge of 3G is particularly low . . . with more than three in four residential consumers unaware of this term. Furthermore, the majority of consumers have not heard of 3G as a term relating to communications services."

While the operators will argue that consumers buy services, not technologies, it will still stick in the craws of many marketing executives that so few British people seem to have heard of the technologies on which mobile companies have spent such vast sums of money. According to newspaper reports, some operators have openly stated that 4G, the shorthand for the next generation of mobile networks after 3G, should never be used outside technical planning rooms.

The lack of knowledge about 3G will also trouble companies such as Vodafone who have spent so much money advertising their new high-speed mobile services.