The players in the European market have the effrontery to claim that growth in mobile communications in this region would not only outpace the fixed line growth but also overtake it.

In Finland, which has the highest penetration rate of around 60 per cent, the mobile growth rate is already at par with the fixed line penetration.

While talking to the press, Jurgen Von Kuczkowski, CEO of the fastest growing German firm, Mannesman Mobilfunk asserts: "In the next two to three years, there will be more mobile telephone subscribers than home-based fixed lines."

Success of Finland and other Scandinavian countries can also be traced to the fact that there was ample and structured competition in these markets. Finland was among the earliest to privatise the telecom industry. In Germany and the UK, there are four to five large national players.

These players also offer innovative services. D2, a company belonging to Mannesman Mobilfunk, would soon be launching general packet radio systems (GPRS), which would allow high speed Internet access (around 1 Mbps) and permit devices to remain permanently on-line, with users billed only for the time spent on receiving bursts of data.

In the UK, which has around 20 million mobile users, there is a race for providing wireless Internet accesses. Britain's largest ISP, Free-Serve Plc announced plans to attack the wireless Internet market that is to be auctioned soon. Free-Serve Plc turned the tables on ISP players when it started offering free access to the Internet. Players fear that the British firm intends to do the same in the wireless markets.

Customer-based innovations have also been the order of the day. There are teenagers in Finland routinely using the short message service (SMS) to arrange dates. The SMS allows for cell phones to send or receive short e-mails of around 160 characters to any other cell phone.

Interestingly, these services are making inroads into other low-tech markets as well. According to a Fortune International report, since April 1998, RadioMobil in Prague, Czechoslovakia, which has around 630,000 mobile subscribers, has been offering similar facilities. RadioMobil's services allow the user to send e-mail to a PC, get news from the Czech news service and make secure bank transactions. Volumes from these information services have increased 700 per cent in the 16 months since their introduction, with 25 per cent of subscribers using them.