The answer's yes if the question's nothing more difficult than: "Does Europe's version of third generation mobile phone technology work"? But if you want to know whether it is going to be a commercial success, then the Isle of Man's 3G service hasn't got the answer - yet.

That shouldn't detract from Manx Telecom's heroic achievement in creating an operational, albeit Lilliputian, 3G service based on technical specifications which are still being drafted.

Easy it was not. At the peak, 40 NEC engineers were based at the company's Cooil Road headquarters to assist Manx's own technologists, while another 100 provided support 24 hours a day from Tokyo.

Richard McGuiness, the veteran Scottish engineer responsible for the network engineering, enthuses about the result: "We can show you what the rest of the world will look like in 18 months time."

Manx Telecom, a wholly owned subsidiary of mmO2, formerly the mobile arm of British Telecom, started work on the 3G project in 1999. It has been carried out in collaboration with NEC, the supplier of handsets and infrastructure, and Siemens, the German electronics group. The idea was to test the principles of 3G technology and service in an environment which, some argue, is a microcosm of the mainland. (It isn't. The Isle of Man is technologically advanced with 2,000 broadband lines for its 75,000 inhabitants.)

Since the service went live in December last year, the company has been inundated with visitors eager to see for themselves whether McGuiness's claim is justified.

UMTS, Universal Mobile Telephone Service, is Europe's version of the wideband code division multiple access (w-CDMA) technology which is being universally adopted for 3G services. Think of 3G as a big, fat pipe to your mobile phone, compared with today's narrow GSM pipe which is capable of carrying only voice, simple text and rudimentary graphics. The 3G pipe, on the other hand, will be able to carry full motion video images in colour and fast access to the internet.

Qualcom, a US company, pioneered CDMA: some 3G-like services have been launched using its technology, mainly in South Korea. Europe and its Japanese partners had to develop UMTS and UMTS handsets from scratch. For the most part, they underestimated the difficulty: there have been serious technical snags and delays. So a principal objective of the Manx experiment has been to prove the basic technology.

This has been achieved. Visitors come away impressed by colour screens, almost instantaneous connection to the internet, videoconferencing using a digital camera attached to a handset, and locational services - a PC attached to a handset displays a map and a guide to places of interest as you drive about the island. But impressive though this is, it is not the 3G we have been led to expect. It falls short in three critical areas.

First, operators have been promising transmission speeds of up to 2m bits a second, about the minimum to display full motion video comfortably. Top speed on the Manx service is only 384,000 bits a second.

Second, while 3G will be commercially successful only if it achieves a mass market, the Isle of Man experiment is tiny. Manx Telecom has so far taken delivery of only about 200 handsets from NEC of which some 70 are in use, roughly three-quarters in the hands of Manx employees or relatives.

Third, the handsets, designed along Japanese rather than European lines, are single mode, made to handle only 3G transmissions. It is axiomatic that European users will demand dual mode phones capable of both GSM and 3G to cover the period before 3G networks are ubiquitous across Europe. So the Manx service tests UMTS neither for speed nor volume of transmission. Nor, indeed, for the technically difficult "hand-off" of calls to and from the handset between 3G and slower networks like GSM.

McGuiness accepts this criticism, but adds: "The argument has to move away from 'Does 3G work?' to what can we do with it and how can operators make money from it."

The services customers will want to use and pay for over 3G networks are a central theme of the trial. "By mid-summer, we will have a very good idea of what people want out of 3G," McGuiness says.

Chris Blackburn, owner of the eponymous estate agent's office in Castletown, has already found a use to benefit his business. He takes pictures of properties with his digital camera which, when downloaded to his laptop, can be whisked in seconds across the island either to his office or to the local papers for that week's advertisement. He is enthusiastic about the time and money he saves. But then he may be not entirely unbiased: his wife Julie does press relations for Manx Telecom.

The Manx project has no ready answers to many of the key concerns about 3G, but it would be unfair to expect too much in the way of conclusions at this stage. The purpose is to test alternative approaches with a view to developing specifications which can be rolled out across the UK.

Like Dr Johnson's performing dog, the wonder is that UMTS works at all, let alone works perfectly. Mark Briers, the project director, is realistic about its limitations: "We've learned enough to write the first couple of chapters in the marketing handbook," he says, cheerfully.

alan.cane@ft.com

A taste of the 3G services to come