France last month became the last of the major western European countries to launch commercial services using GPRS, the interim "2.5G" cellular technology that offers faster data transmission speeds than standard second-generation GSM networks, as well as always-on connectivity.

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The France Telecom-owned Orange launched its commercial offering for business users on February 19, at the same time as it launched in four other countries - the UK, Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland. Bouygues Telecom followed suit on February 20, and the Vivendi-backed SFR said it would do the same by the end of March. All three companies say that consumer services will follow later in the year.

The French moves came nearly two years after BT Cellnet became the first operator in the world to start offering GPRS in June 2000.

The delay illustrates the difficulties that continue to plague GPRS. While the long-running lack of GPRS handsets finally began to be rectified towards the end of last year, there are still technical problems.

For instance, Nokia's first GPRS product, the 8310, is not compatible with older networks. And none of the models on the market provide a good user experience, since all of them remain difficult and slow to use. Moreover, there continues to be a shortage of attractive services and applications that will encourage subscribers to sign up.

As a result, the initial take-up of GPRS has been disappointing. While some of the leading manufacturers had predicted that they would ship 10m GPRS handsets by the end of last year, the actual figure was just over 7m. In Sweden, no more than one in 10 new subscribers are choosing to sign up for GPRS despite aggressive discounting by all operators.

Many analysts now say that the overall GPRS market will not begin to take off until 2003, and that it will be another two years before significant data revenues can be expected. Forecasts for the take-up of full 3G services are similarly being pushed back.

A report by consultants Arthur D. Little and brokers Exane predicts that many of the technical uncertainties on GPRS will remain unresolved until late 2002 - and possibly longer. It will take until then to achieve wide availability of attractive well-priced GPRS-ready devices with features such as high-definition colour screens, PDA functions and a standardised version of multimedia messaging service (MMS) - the new messaging service that will allow users to send colour pictures, animations, audio and video clips along with text.

This view is backed by consultants Pyramid Research, which says that take-up will be limited this year as operators continue to work through the mass of challenges in front of them, including the need to establish co-operative content development solutions and international roaming agreements, and to overcome technical glitches. It predicts that it will take until 2005 for GPRS to account for one-quarter of subscribers in western Europe.

Meanwhile, operators are focusing on corporate users, rather than consumers. Companies are thought to be willing to pay significant sums to enable their staff to carry out more of their existing activities from mobile devices, such as checking e-mail and accessing customer data. And these activities do not require colour screens.

Accordingly, many initial projects involve links to company e-mail servers running Microsoft Exchange or IBM's Lotus software, with the expectation that more advanced services will follow. Orange, along with other operators, is placing a high emphasis on this area.

But operators could have problems addressing this segment because they have little experience pitching higher-end data services to business customers. And provisioning is a much more complex process than it is with voice services.

Meanwhile, events have been rather quiet in the area of 3G licensing. But the governments of Luxembourg and Ireland, the last two EU governments to invite bids, will be hoping that this changes soon. Both have set application deadlines for their beauty contests for later this month. But indications are that the levels of interest remain low.

The Czech government has agreed to delay the award of the country's third 3G licence until there is more interest in bidding for it. The licence would be awarded under the same conditions as used for the first two, which were auctioned in December for Kcs3.86bn (E120m, not E1.2bn as incorrectly converted in January's survey) and Kcs3.54bn.

Those companies that have already won licences in other countries are, in most cases, still seeking to push back their plans for 3G expenditure.

Neil McCartney is editor of 'Wireless Internet' on www.mmwirelessinternet.com