More from Tomi Ahonen, on 3:

"Three has released its ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) numbers for Italy and the UK for the second quarter of 2004. The total subscriber numbers have doubled 1.4 M in Italy, 1.3 M in the UK, yet the ARPU level is almost identical, at twice the average for 2G customers in both markets. This is very remarkable and against the conventional wisdom of most forecasters and modellers. The assumption was that the first few to get 3G will be the heavy users, with astronomical ARPU levels, but as more mainstream customers sign up, they will bring more typical usage, dropping the average across the whole network. Three has been incredibly successful this year (as opposed to seemingly doing everything wrong last year) "