Explaining what 3G is

Today I had to explain in written what was 3G and how it was different with 2G. The new interest in mobile network generations is due to the fact the 3 big Russian GSM operators finally got their 3G licenses. They are going to build the networks and commercially launch them in 2008.

Most people in Russia who ever heard about 3G think that 3G is a development of GSM. They aren't aware of the fact that 3G is a generation that include various standards, namely both UMTS (the one GSM operators are going to launch in Russia) and CDMA 1xEVDO that we've already launched with Sky Link.

I think the new interest of journalists in 3G is a good way for us to promote the fact that 3G is already in Russia and anyone can try it with our company.

The text of my explanations (in Russian) is available on mir66.ru.

New Phone

I've changed my old Ubiquam U-300 mobile phone to the brand new U-520. The new phone looks pretty good, but I'll need time to get used to it.

The new phone is pretty slim and light, has MP3 player, video player, 2mpx camera, bluetooth. But what's the most important, it's dual mode -- can work either in CDMA-450 or in GSM networks.

The phone has a few problems, for example you can't switch to Cyrillic in the browser, there's no pc-sync utility yet. I hope they'll fix these in the next software update.

In any case so far I'm happy with the new phone.

Sorry, no terminals until 20th of January

The demand for new EVDO terminals grew so fast, we ran out of stock in a week after we started our December discounts. Yes, I admit, we were not quite ready. We did not expect so many customers. We tried and get three more supplies from our terminal distributors, but they were not enough. We were trying to get more, but today they gave us the final answer. The answer is negative. There are no more such terminals available in Russia. The next supply can only be expected in late January.

And that's bad. I'm happy, of course, the demand is so high. But I'm really disappointed we can't fulfill it. And people do complain. Some say we intentionally created this deficit to provoke the demand. Others say we never wanted to sell many terminals on discounted price and the terminals will appear out of the blue as soon as the discount time is over.

In fact we did not plan to create the deficit or to limit the sales. We did not plan such a big sales, that was our mistake. When we saw we can't fulfill the demand, we even gave discount for one more model that we have in stock and that is available from our suppliers.

The bottom line for me is the thought that December is a crazy time for people. Sales can increase much more than it is expected and we'll need to take it into account when preparing the sales plans.

The sales raised so much we're running out of stock

The November was not good at all and all the actions and ad campaigns did not help. The sales were too low. Finally we made substantial discounts and everything changed. Now we lack supplies. All the terminals we get are being sold withing days. Our suppliers can't provide more, so it looks like we're going to sell all we have by the middle of the month. I don't know what we'll do if we run completely out of stock. The discount is already announced and we cannot rise the prices before December 31st. Well, in any case this situation is much better than the low sells we used to have, but what will we be saying to our customers when our stock is empty?