Case Study: Cosmote makes Athens 3G - August 2004  

Damian Charalambidis, products, services and marketing general director of Cosmote, the Grand National Sponsor of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, talks to S&T about how mobile telephony will be used to cover the world's greatest sporting event and how he expects the Games to increase 3G take-up globally.

Cosmote, the leading provider of mobile telecoms services in Greece has undertaken the highly demanding task of covering the mobile telecoms needs of the forthcoming Athens Olympic Games through its role as Grand National Sponsor. "The Athens Games will be the first in which mobile telephony will have such a broad application, due to its high penetration on a global scale and the convergence of new technologies," says Charalambidis, explaining Cosmote's reason for becoming a sponsor of the Games. "[Cosmote has a] strong belief and faith in the country's ability to successfully organise and host the most significant athletic and cultural event on the planet. In this sense, the Olympics provide a unique business opportunity to showcase Cosmote's social profile, promote its corporate reputation and enhance its image as an international telecoms provider."
Aiming to successfully respond to the increased technical needs of the Games, Cosmote has:
· Upgraded and expanded its existing advanced telecoms network, building its Olympic Network in Athens and the wider region of Attica as well as the other five Olympic cities. This network has the capacity of covering the telecoms needs of an area of the size of Peloponese. More specifically, within the Olympic Stadium, Cosmote's network capacity has increased up to 15-fold.
· Installed new telecoms equipment, within the Olympic venues, with the aim to further increase its existing infrastructure in the whole of the Attica region by 40% (2004 versus 2003 data). Specifically, for the Olympic Games, Cosmote has created five brand new Base Station Control Centres (BSCs), one more high capacity Mobile Telephony Center (MSC) and one extra GPRS node, while it is significantly enhancing its existing network. It is worth noting that the radio network covering the Olympic Stadium area has the capacity of serving more than 1m subscribers.
· Developed its Olympic Network - having started its planning as early as 2001, following particularly strict standards on a global scale, with the aim of providing over 99% Grade of Service and over 99.5% network availability.
· Furthermore, Cosmote is developing a range of new, advanced, value added services of 2G, 2.5G and 3G technologies. During the Athens Games, i-mode, the most popular wireless internet service on the mobile phone worldwide (with 44.7m subscribers; over 3m outside Japan), will also be available. Cosmote launched i-mode on 7 June 2004, exclusively in the Greek market, following a partnership agreement signed in November 2003 with Japan's leading mobile telecoms company, NTT DoCoMo.

The launch of 3G in Greece

Cosmote launched 3G services to its corporate and retail contract customers on 26 May 2004, becoming the first operator in the Greek mobile market to provide video streaming, a service that allows its customers to enjoy high quality video clips at high speed. Cosmote's range of 3G services also features video calling, a service through which Cosmote customers can see the person they are talking to while making a call, in realtime. Besides introducing new services, Cosmote's 3G network allows the company to upgrade existing services, providing faster internet browsing, multimedia messaging service (MMS) and access to WAP web pages at a higher speed and with richer content. For Cosmote's 3G Video Calling service, customers are charged €0.01/second, while for the Video Streaming service, they are charged with a monthly fee of €5 that includes 500KB bundled volume and a charging of €0.001/KB for volume exceeding the 500KB.
Currently, the handsets supporting Cosmote's 3G voice and data services are the Nokia 6650 and Nokia 7600 - that support video streaming - the Sony Ericsson Z1010 - that offers both video streaming and video calling - as well as the Siemens U15 and the Motorola A835. With these specific handsets, users can seamlessly roam between Cosmote's 2G and 3G network without call interruptions.
So, which 3G services will Cosmote actually be offering during the Games? Charalambidis explains: "Especially for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, Cosmote has deployed its 3G network in order to fully accommodate the predicted demand of the early adopters of 3G services. Due to the vast development of the wireless communications and the fact that Cosmote, traditionally offers technologically advanced services, the company is planning to offer a wide range of 2G, 2.5G and, beyond its contractual obligations, 3G services. During the Games i-mode services will be also available, the most popular Internet services on the mobile phone, offered exclusively by Cosmote as of 7 June 2004."
Cosmote has designed multiple Olympic Games specific data services that will be available upon the opening of the Games through 3G network, i-mode as well as the 'My Cosmos' services portal, thus offering a wide range of Olympic related content, such as information concerning the athletes' track record and achievements, interviews, biographies, pictures and special video services that allow its customers to access the latest news, follow each day's developments, receive valid online information and a rich variety of multimedia material from the leading athletic event. Additionally, the company has enriched its i-mode portal with a brand new thematic category titled Athens 2004 with multiple Olympic targeted i-mode sites.

Looking ahead

In May 2004, Cosmote soft launched its 3G services in Greece. "We are planning to gradually expand the range of 3G services and handsets as well as launching the first 3G/i-mode services that are already successfully in use in Japan," says Charalambidis. "In this framework, we expect 3G services to take up in 2005. We are confident that the future of mobile telephony lies in the data services sector, thus our forecasts are very optimistic. The increasing awareness of 3G services, as well as the enthusiastic welcome of i-mode by our customers, confirms our confidence. A great challenge is presented and that is to showcase the superiority of our data services portfolio and prove their value on a global scale. For the first time, usable data services have become a reality and this is a unique business opportunity of significant value. So, our role now on is to generate awareness and eventually reap the benefits of these efforts."
Charalambidis is bullish that the Olympics will grow interest in 3G throughout Cosmote's domestic market as well as globally. "The Games create a major opportunity to showcase our overall technological profile internationally. As 3G is still in its infancy, the majority of people coming to the Games will mostly use 2 and 2.5G technology, however we expect 3G awareness to increase. With our Olympic sponsorship we rather expect to promote our image globally and showcase our advanced technological profile internationally, as it is best demonstrated by the advanced, especially designed for the Games telecoms infrastructure, more than 80% of which will remain after the Games, ranking Greece among the most developed countries in terms of telecoms worldwide."
Cosmote will continue to offer video streaming of sports events on 3G long after the circus has left town. Says Charalambidis: "Cosmote is and has always been present at every major athletic event. The company's dedication to providing its customers with pioneering data services and content, including sports focused data, has proved to be more than successful. In this framework, the company introduced a rich services menu especially for EURO 2004 [the UEFA 2004 European Championships] and, as mentioned before, is currently enriching its data services portfolio (through i-mode, My Cosmos services portal and 3G network) with innovative Olympic related services for Athens 2004."
A Greek patriot through and through, Charalambidis is confident that, contrary to media reports, Greece will successfully organise and host the best Games ever. "[This] will create new standards as well as opportunities in the sports sector, opportunities that Cosmote will impeccably use to the benefit of its customers."

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