Nokia is to make its own 3G USB dongles in Europe. From Reuters:
Nokia declined to comment on the price of the device — which uses HSPA, a super-fast 3G technology — saying it would be sold mostly through operators and bundled with services.
Strategy Analytics said it expects the global market for so-called “dongles” — external USB modems and PC cards — to grow to 26 million units next year from 20 million this year.
It’s remarkable to think that while 3G is still shiny and fresh here, and carriers charge stiff fees for data and phone-as-modem plans, there are already price wars over it elsewhere –and it comes as standard on cheap Euro-netbooks like the EeePC Go.
Source [Reuters via UMPC Portal]
Rob – just being a bit picky, but for those who are not 101% au fait with all this, “here…” and “elsewhere…” being, well, where? If as I suspect “here” means USA – that’s a bit parochial for a global internet audience, no? You could be anywhere.
What, you didn’t know we’re in Bhutan?
Rob, I thought you were in Germany??
But no, seriosuly, where is “here”?
Look, if it’s on boing boing, then you can bet the default location inherently indicated is LA, SF, Sebastopol or berkeley…
Which BTW, Sebastopol is lovely.
Why there’s a 3G dongle price war in Europe:
Visiting London last week, I stayed in a hotel with wifi. They wanted £15 per 24 hours (US $22) for bandwidth — and that’s normal for a British hotel. After a day I cracked, walked into a 3 shop (3 is a 3G-only telco), and bought a pay-as-you-go dongle for £50, topped it up with 3Gb of data for £10, and I was good to go.
That dongle is priced so that it breaks even with respect to the extortionate hotel wifi after 4 days. And although it’s got the usual drawbacks of a pay-as-you-go gadget — credit expires after 30 days, for example, and coverage is patchy — it’s still very useful for someone who just wants to be connected three or four times a year when they go and stay in a hotel who think wifi is a luxury extra.
“Look, if it’s on boing boing, then you can bet the default location inherently indicated is LA, SF, Sebastopol or berkeley…”
Default location is in fact Pittsburgh.
PWNED!
Joel is in NY, John is in Berlin.
“See you in Pittsburgh“
It’s taken long enough to get to this point though. The 3G licences were auctioned off in 2000 and the telcos tried everything but offering data until about two years ago: live football, music videos, video calling – until T-Mobile came out their web’n'walk service. Even now though, add-on data packages on phones are rubbish on some providers – 10Mb on Orange still costs £4 a month, when a dongle with 3Gb of data costs £15.