Mobile phone operator Eircell is confident that the commercial introduction of GPRS (General Packet Radio Services) will take place by the end of this year.
GPRS is the second phase of Eircell's mobile data services. With GPRS users can log into a data network and the service will always remain on.
Users are charged per kilobyte (KB) and not per second, which means they are charged for what they download rather than how long they are on the line.
Eircell's £80 million (#102 million) GPRS network was completed in March and corporate trials are ongoing, with a peak speed of 36 KBs. However, limited availability of handsets is delaying roll out.
Mr Brewer said that Eircell is testing GPRS "to death", but it does not have many handsets to test it on.
Around 100,000 handsets will be required for the introduction. Eircell is using a Motorola handset for the trial period.
The range of services available on GPRS will not be revealed until the launch. In addition to the hundreds of WAP and SMS services, the new phones will have 25 new services, including location-based services and transaction-based services.
"I don't believe this year it [GPRS] will be a boom mass market Christmas product," Eircell chief executive, Mr Steven Brewer, said. The following Christmas, he forecast, would be the lucrative one for GPRS phone sales.
