Radio firm in phone deal with BT

British radio group GWR announced today it had joined forces with BT Wholesale to create a new digital service which should boost its revenues by more than £5m (€7.4m) a year.

The new entity, which will be part of BT Wholesale, will deliver a range of real-time services direct to consumers’ mobile phones and PDAs.

Services being considered include news and sports updates, information on traffic congestion, stock market information and share prices, film previews and digital radio broadcasts.

Unlike other services that users have to dial up to from their mobile phones, this will be broadcast to people, giving them instant access.

GWR, which is based in Bristol, is investing a further £2.75m (€4.1m) into the service, to start broadcasting at the end of next year, on top of the £4.4m (€6.5m) it has already put in.

The group should receive its first revenue share from the business in the year ending March 2007, and is expected to receive a share of more than £5m (€7.4m) out of revenues of around £30m (€44.5m) by March 2008.

The new service will initially be launched within the M25 area of the south east of England, with nationwide services due to be rolled out by the end of 2006.

Ralph Bernard, GWR executive chairman, said: “We stated that we planned to exploit ground-breaking opportunities for interactive datacasting using digital radio broadcasting capacity when we initiated the GWR Livetime project.

“BT’s communications network, technology expertise and relationships with service providers make it the ideal partner to take this project forward.”

He added that the introduction of DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) radio chips in mobile phones would significantly increase the number of digital radios in the UK, particularly as people tended to replace mobile phones more frequently than they did radios.

GWR owns Classic FM, as well as a range of local radio stations in the UK, including Essex FM, Leicester Sound and Trent FM.