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These services will be tested in practice in extensive pilots together with The Hague City Council, Siemens Netherlands, Rotterdam Municipal Port Management with the Loodswezen (pilotage) and Eneco Energie.

Safety

In the Haque, members of the city watch teams will be able to report and resolve incidents more rapidly, by equipping them with UMTS compatible devices. This will improve public order in the city. The pilot service in the port of Rotterdam ensures that ships enter and leave port safely. Using mobile data communications, pilots on board ship will have direct digital access to the information available on shore such as the latest depth and current measurements. Eneco Infra Services will speed the maintenance and inspection of the energy network as well as the reporting and resolving of interruptions by giving engineers mobile access to plans of network components and connections. For Siemens The Netherlands, the UMTS pilot will mean amongst other things a reduction in waiting times for field service engineers.

Improved performance

With UMTS, users are able to do their jobs outside the office or their place of work more quickly and efficiently, regardless of location or time. For businesses and institutions, this results in improvements in business processes, cost reduction and/or increased revenue. This comes within reach because the UMTS network enables information exchanged more quickly. Cees van den Heijkant, Managing Director of KPN Mobile The Netherlands, comments: "The use of mobile data solutions over the current GPRS network already makes an important contribution to the performance of many organisations in the Netherlands. Not just businesses profit, but also organisations in the fields of health care, security and education, for example. We are taking a further step with UMTS. It is important to us to gain experience with the integration of mobile data services in business practices and processes together with our customers".

Network rollout

For the pilots, KPN will utilise its UMTS network in large parts of the province of South Holland besides its GSM/GPRS network. The UMTS pilots will run for a number of months. They form part of the preparations for the market introduction of services over UMTS from mid 2004. KPN will only launch services over UMTS once they meet KPN's exacting standards with respect to quality of network, devices and services. KPN is investing ?1.5 billion in the rollout of UMTS networks in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium up to and including 2005.