Hutchison Australia to shift to 3G

Hutchison Telecommunications will be Australia’s first mobile operator to shift all customers to its 3G network.

The company said on Tuesday that it intends to shut down its 2G network for good on August 9 in order to focus on its 3G services. The company has already launched a campaign to have its 2G customers switch to 3G and, thus far, has brought 200,000 customers on board.

chief executive Kevin Russell told reporters on Tuesday that “with 2G market service revenue now in decline and 3G growing rapidly, our focus is absolutely in the right direction… We are very well placed to continue to strengthen our market leading position in 3G and want this position established while our competitors are still struggling to bed down their own 3G offerings and technology.”

Hutchison hopes to have more than a million customers using its 3G services by the end of June at a cost of around $145m (ВЈ59.81m) but said it expects to save about $70m a year.

While Hutchison is leading the Australian pack, the incumbent Telstra is currently working on a $1bn 3G network. Its current CDMA network is due to be shut down in 2008.

Tags: 3G, Australia, Hutchison, Regional

This entry was posted on May 11th, 2006 and is filed under Operators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.