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Vodafone Spain today announces the start of its pre-commercial customer trials of Spain's first 3G dual mobile data card - compatible with both GPRS and 3G. Providing speeds of up to 384 kbps, the new data card is an evolved version of the GPRS (2.5G) Mobile Connect Card, known as Vodafone Remote Access, which has been available from Vodafone for almost a year.

These Vodafone trials, being conducted amongst a number of existing corporate customers, will provide them with the opportunity to try out third generation mobile communications services prior to commercial launch. The start of Vodafone Spain's 3G customer trials follows the beginning of those by Vodafone Group subsidiaries in Italy and Germany, as announced last week. For the trial, 2,000 3G Mobile Connect Cards will be distributed to selected Vodafone Spain corporate customers.

The Vodafone 3G Mobile Connect Card will provide a great step forward in remote working, enabling companies to achieve greater mobile productivity: it allows access to the Internet, to corporate intranets and the receipt of e-mail messages at speeds that are up to 10 times greater than those currently available using GPRS or 2.5G and also faster than conventional fixed ADSL lines. Customers will be able to download information from their network at speeds of up to 384 kbps. Vodafone's 3G Mobile Connect Card is also compatible with personal organisers - for both GPRS and UMTS data transmission.

Third Generation applications, such as the 3G Mobile Connect Card, will offer customers greater quality and reliability, although the technology being used will be transparent for them. Operating dual-mode radio capability, the 3G Connect Card operates over the UMTS network where 3G coverage exists, but automatically hooks up to the GSM-GPRS network where UMTS coverage is still not available. In this case, transmission speeds are reduced to a maximum of about 40 kbit/sec, equivalent to a dial-up connection - the switch between networks, however, takes place automatically and without the customer having to concern himself.

Vodafone Spain will begin to commercially offer customers its first 3G services next year and anticipates complete coverage in Spain's 23 largest cities by October 2004.

"These are the first customer trials that we have undertaken following the internal trial service that we have been operating for a number of months now," explained Francisco Roman, Chief Executive of Vodafone Spain. "The trials will give some of our corporate customers the opportunity to try out our high performance 3G network and enable them to not only judge for themselves, but also give us their feedback on the functioning of the 3G mobile service before its commercial launch next year."

The Vodafone Mobile Connect Card UMTS will be supplied pre-configured for simple access to the Internet and Intranet. The package will consist of a PC card, software and a comprehensive user guide. The special user interface "the "Dashboard" can be used simply and intuitively. The Dashboard will enable all data connections, access to the Internet or Intranet and SMS, e-mail as well as the Instant Messenger to be controlled simply and directly.