The myth that UMTS will one day revolutionize the way people communicate has been around for what seems like ever. Like an Urban Legend device manufacturers and network providers spread the rumor that “next year” everybody would watch TV on their mobile phone or surf the web via notebook from merely ANY location on earth. Only that “next year” has not come up quite yet.

In 1999 the first mega-million deal was cut between Lucent Technologies, Ericsson and NEC to supply NTT – the Japanese communications big dogs – with functioning devices for a W-CDMA network. This complex formula stands for Wideband Code Division Multiple Access – or in non-techno-English: high-speed mobile networks. In 2001 the first commercial W-CDMA network was launched in Japan and opened the gate to the 3G (third generation) era.

Only one year later the Europeans followed suit when they went online with their first third generation communications network on UMTS standard. This is now more than four years ago. And really: working commercial networks offering high speed connections through UMTS or W-CDMA are available in most countries of the world by now.

The only slight problem is that the next revolution in mobile access costs a pretty dear price. And despite the fact that licenses to spread 3G networks across the civilized world have been sold to network operators at absolutely unreal amounts. Many hundreds of billions of Euros were paid by the Vodafones, Oranges, Telefonicas, and all the other big players on the global mobile network market to participate in this predicted gold rush. Unfortunately consumers are still not willing to dig as deeply into their pockets for these high-speed services themselves.

A recent study by German researchers TNS infratest showed that around the world 23% percent of people refuse to enter the 3G era because of the high costs. As long as the prices for UMTS usage will not go down, it is likely that we have to wait for yet another “next year” until the next revolution in mobile access arrives.