Australian comedy icons, Roy & HG, will team up with Telstra BigPond Broadband and 3G to provide Australian football fans exclusive match round ups during the Socceroos campaign in Germany.

From Thursday 8 June, ‘Dribble with Roy & HG’ will deliver the pair’s unrivalled and irreverent insights to all Broadband and Telstra 3G customers nationally*.

BigPond Group Managing Director, Mr Justin Milne said today: “We could not be happier having Rampaging Roy Slaven and H.G. Nelson giving fans what we reckon will be the best commentary you’ll hear on the Socceroos’ progress in Germany.

“Fans can expect Roy and HG to present a unique football experience on their 3G phones or broadband connection thanks to BigPond’s commitment to compelling online and mobile content on the Telstra network,” Mr Milne said.

Fans will be able to enjoy eight “Dribble” programs, as well as 25 video news updates each day of the tournament. These video highlights will be made available over the broadband and Telstra 3G mobile networks.

This latest video content offering complements Telstra’s HeroMessageВ® service which was launched in late May by Socceroo Lucas Neill. Australians can send a HeroMessage by logging onto www.socceroos.bigpond.com or sending text, picture or video to 0428 MYHERO.

The website offering will feature:

* 8 exclusive Roy & HG broadband programs (available live, replayed or as highlight packages)

* 25 video news programs during the tournament

* 32 team video profiles

* 32 player video profiles

* Telstra HeroMessage

* Screen savers and wall papers

The 3G mobile service* offering will feature:

* Exclusive Roy & HG 3G program (available as highlight packages)

* 25 daily video news – available during the tournament

* Live scores

* Ring tones

* Wall papers

The coverage from Germany joins BigPond’s AFL, NRL, V8 Supercars and Horse Racing content, as well as BigPond News, BigPond Movies, BigPond Music, BigPond Kids and BigPond Games.

Telstra is a sponsor of Football Federation Australia, and supports football at both an elite and grassroots level. Telstra’s sponsorship extends from the Hyundai A-League and the Socceroos through to community clubs with the Telstra Assistance Fund and Telstra Football Anytime.

Roy & HG’s honour roll includes:

* Hosts of Triple J’s “This Sporting Life”

* The Dream – Sydney, Salt Lake City and Athens Olympic Games (Network 7)

* The Monday Dump (Network 7)

* The Nation Dumps – Election 2001

The worldwide movement by operators to deploy high speed mobile broadband services – based on the global W-CDMA and HSDPA technology standards – is fuelling unprecedented economies of scale in the supply of equipment for carriers and handsets for consumers, said the GSM Association (GSMA) today.

According to the GSMA, the global trade organisation for the mobile industry, more than 105 mobile networks have launched commercial W-CDMA networks across 50 countries so far. Following the world’s first large scale commercial launch of HSDPA – the next evolution of W-CDMA – by Cingular Wireless last year in the US, more than 95 operators from 48 countries are deploying, or have announced plans to deploy the technology. Already, 18 mobile networks are providing live commercial W-CDMA/ HSDPA services in 14 countries.

Among the raft of global operator commitments, a number of networks have already announced deployment of W-CDMA/HSDPA in the 850MHz frequency band, including Cingular Wireless, Telstra in Australia and Rogers Wireless – Canada’s largest wireless voice and data communications service provider.

“Our plans to introduce a state of the art network based on the world standard for 3G wireless communications – W-CDMA – is a natural progression for Rogers’ coast-to-coast GSM/EDGE network,” said Bob Berner, CTO of Rogers Wireless. “By deploying HSDPA in the 850MHz frequency band, we will be able to better provide our customers in Canada with advanced mobile services, delivering speeds of up to 1.5 to 2 times faster than those claimed for competing technologies.”

This week, mobile operator KTF of Korea also announced that it will switch focus from its CDMA network to a new nationwide W-CDMA/ HSDPA network covering 84 South Korean cities by the end of the year. KTF has cited many compelling reasons for this shift, from simple economic efficiencies and global roaming to global handset availability and choice, economies of scale and significant potential revenue gains from high speed services.

As part of the evolutionary GSM family of technologies, W-CDMA & HSDPA will benefit from the strengths of the global GSM eco-system, such as global roaming and interoperability, open standards and huge economies of scale – evidenced through lower costs for handsets, and greater variety.

More than 315 handset products for W-CDMA are available already from the vendor community, 25 of which are HSDPA ready and a raft of new products are due for shipment in 2006.

“With more than 680 networks in our community heading along this globally agreed evolutionary path, no other technology can match the economies of scale and interoperability generated by GSM’s 1.8 billion and growing user base,” said Rob Conway, CEO and Board member of the GSM Association. “As economies of scale reach the point of critical mass for suppliers, we will see HSDPA become a ubiquitous part of device product ranges, just as GSM, GPRS and W-CDMA are today.”

The CTO of Cingular Wireless, the first network in the world to launch a large scale HSDPA network, Kris Rinne added: “Cingular is demonstrating that HSDPA is a real and robust technology that allows people on the move to enjoy high speed data and multimedia products and services. For us it was about enhancing our broad deployment of EDGE capabilities in the urban and suburban areas – and in technology terms, UMTS (W-CDMA) with HSDPA is uniquely positioned as the only 3G technology that supports both circuit switched voice and high speed packet data.”

The trend of operator migration from TDMA, CDMA and PDC to the global mobile path of GSM/GPRS/ W-CDMA & HSDPA continues – as seen across a raft of countries from Australia, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, to Japan, Korea, Singapore and the US among many others in recent years. This ease of migration has been witnessed in the phenomenal growth of markets such as Brazil, which three years ago moved to the GSM family. Today GSM is the market leader, and the choice of more than 50 million users.

In terms of global footprint, the GSM world is more than six times bigger than that of the nearest competing wireless technology, with 82% share of the digital wireless market and growing, while market share for other wireless technologies continues to decline. The scale of GSM growth enables consumers to enjoy unequalled value and variety of products and services, brought to bear by a global eco-system of hundreds and thousands of suppliers, as opposed to the few serving proprietary standards.

OPTUS is preparing to offer free mobile phones to push customers towards its third generation, or 3G service.

But it said it had yet to find an appropriate handset or price point. The number two telco has so far spent $370 million on its new 3G mobile network, which gives users faster and cheaper services, but is yet to aggressively push its 2G customers towards it.

Earlier this year, almost half a million Hutchison mobile subscribers were offered a new free 3G handset as the provider moved to ditch its 2G network entirely.

Optus chief executive Paul O’Sullivan said the telco would look to offer free handsets before Christmas.

“We are driven by customer behaviours, rather than necessarily by the technology itself,” Mr O’Sullivan said.

“We have been making sure we are 3G-enabled, we have put about $370 million into the 3G network and we have about 1100 base stations.

“Whilst we are well enabled on the technology side, we are not yet comfortable that for the mass market of customers our handsets both in terms of price and performance are quite where they need to be to be an economic proposition.”

He said some high-spend Optus customers were being offered free handsets.

“But for the wider mass market we don’t believe there is a handset at a suitable price with a suitable level of performance that we are prepared to push aggressively,” Mr O’Sullivan said.

“We do think that will change between now and Christmas, which is a fairly big volume period in the mobile market.

“So when we think it is right for customers – and when we know if we give customers an incentive to change behaviour the platform will support that move – we will do it.”

According to a recent Citigroup report, rival Telstra has begun aggressively offering new handset subsidies, including free handsets – on a monthly plan – that used to cost up to $699.

Mr O’Sullivan said this would continue to affect competition in the mobile market.

“We have seen Telstra put a fairly significant amount of subsidy on some of its offers in the current quarter and that is undoubtedly driving some competitive momentum,” he said.