Vodafone commercial 3G service launched across Europe

Vodafone has today launched its commercial 3G services in Europe.

The first service from Vodafone will be the Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G/GPRS datacard, Europe's first high speed lap top datacard and will available in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Britain over the next four weeks.

With data rates of up to 384kbps, the datacard will enable Vodafone customers to access all their usual office applications like e-mail, calendar and internet at up to 10 times the speed of GPRS.

The launch of the 3G datacard follows successful customer trials conducted across Europe and coverage will be expanded continually by Vodafone over the next few years.

Vodafone will introduce a consumer service in the next few months, with an enhanced range of 3G devices and services becoming available later in the year.

Peter Bamford, Chief Marketing Officer, said: "With significantly faster data rates and greater capacity, customers will really start to see and experience the huge benefits of 3G, by being able to do more, faster."

Vodafone has equity interests in 26 countries with a proportionate customer base of over 130 million and has partner networks in a further 11 countries.