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 Date	Carrier	Country	Technology	Overall Subscribers	Brand
2001	KTF	Korea	CDMA	13 million
2002	Verizon Wireless	US	CDMA	61 million	Get It Now®
2003	KDDI	Japan	CDMA	29 million	EZapuri
2003	VIVO	Brazil	GSM	30 million	Escritório Móvel Brew
2003	China Unicom	China	CDMA	150 million	U-Magic
TBD	3	UK and 9 other countries	3GSM	13 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.

Technorati Tags: BREW, Europe, Qualcomm