Friday, June 22, 2007

BREW in Europe, too

At its annual BREW developers conference, Qualcomm this week announced that the Chinese firm Hutchison will be rolling out BREW with its operator 3, which has licenses in the U.K., Italy and elsewhere.

Thus far, BREW’s major operators have been Verizon (US), KDDI (Japan) and KTF (Korea), and China Unicom (China). In the US, Verizon Wireless rebrands the service as Get It Now®. BREW is also supported by two of the smaller US CDMA carriers, Alltel and US Cellular, but not the #2 US CDMA carrier (Sprint).

Launch DateCarrierCountryTechnologyOverall
Subscribers
Brand
2001KTFKoreaCDMA13 million 
2002Verizon WirelessUSCDMA61 millionGet It Now®
2003KDDIJapan

CDMA

29 millionEZapuri
2003VIVOBrazilGSM30 millionEscritório Móvel Brew
2003China UnicomChinaCDMA150 millionU-Magic
TBD3UK and 9 other countries3GSM13 million 



Qualcomm has a previous deal with O2 — a competing UK carrier — but that’s only for uiOne, the BREW-derived interface that carriers like because it allows a common look-and-feel for a carrier’s handsets. So if 3 allows European subscribers to download BREW applications, it could mark the first major Qualcomm revenue source in Western Europe.

Carriers have launched some 3G (and 2G) CDMA networks in Eastern Europe, but the only CDMA west of the former Iron Curtain are the tiny Radiomovel Telecommunications in Portugal, and Nordisk Mobiltelefon’s proposed cdma2000 service in the five Nordic countries using the former NMT 450 MHz spectrum.

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