PR releases

UK mobile services tests show 3 to be winner of World Cup first round

One operator scores massive own goal; others live to fight another day ...

Surrey, UK, 13 June 2006 ? Like Paraguay's football team, one of the UK's mobile operators is languishing at the bottom of the group after the first round of matches at the World Cup, according to mobile services tests performed by Argogroup, the mobile data services testing company.

3, the UK's newest mobile operator, took all the plaudits in a comparative test of operators' World Cup alerting services during England's first game against Paraguay last Saturday. 3 provided the cheapest SMS-based service, was competitive in terms of speed of delivery, and was the only one to deliver a video clip of the David Beckham free kick that ended in a Paraguay own goal.

3 video clip arrives before one operator's SMS alert

Argogroup tested the new World Cup services provided by all five UK mobile operators during England's Group B game with Paraguay between 2.00pm and 4.00pm last Saturday 10 June. The services were tested on a variety of phones from different manufacturers. All five operators offer an SMS-based alert before each game offering team news, plus alerts for each goal, at half time and at the end of the game. Only two operators, including 3, offer a video clip service.

T Mobile was fastest with SMS alert

T Mobile ? official sponsor or the tournament ? was fastest to deliver its text update, delivering the news in just over three minutes. This was more than twice as fast as one operator, whose SMS took nearly six and a half minutes to arrive in customers' inboxes. This was nearly 90 seconds slower than it took 3 to deliver an edited, high quality 10 second video clip of David Beckham's free kick. One operator's service disappointed because the registration process failed completely despite several attempts.

According to James Pearce, Argogroup's CTO, the slowest operator's performance was worsened by marketing failures across the board. "Its website did not promote the World Cup tournament or England's participation at all, let alone any World Cup related data services," he said. "On Saturday, it described a football score service, but only for the recently concluded Premiership season." Just to subscribe to the SMS alerts service, the user had to visit and explore the WAP portal. "And at the time of kick-off, the mobile portal was displaying a 'Mr Men' promotion," Pearce notes.

David Frodsham, Argogroup's CEO, said there was a serious point to this testing exercise. "Everyone in the mobile industry needs mobile data services to succeed," he said. The World Cup is the largest show on earth. What our tests show is that operators across the board need to improve the data services they are offering to the public. That depends on a commitment to constant improvement of the user experience by putting testing at the heart of their offerings."

Argogroup will be monitoring the performance of the five UK operators throughout England's participation in the World Cup to judge which of them comes out top in terms of user experience. Regular updates will be published throughout the tournament.

"Expect sinners to be named," warned Frodsham.

About Monitor Master

Winner of the GSMA Best Infrastructure/Network Solution Product 2004 and Frost & Sullivan's Excellence in Technology Award 2004, Monitor Master is a user experience optimisation platform. It mimics real users doing real things on mobile devices, identifying issues that affect user experience including usability, compliance, interoperability and performance. It is 300 times more efficient than manual testing and the one platform supports the assessment of all mobile technologies available such as SMS, EMS, MMS, WAP, J2ME, ring-tones, graphics, video, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), e-mail and Web.

About Argogroup

Argogroup specialises in optimizing user experience for mobile services, a discipline that focuses on the interaction between network, service and handset. The company's two software products - Monitor Master and Device Master - help handset manufacturers and mobile operators test, monitor and develop products and services so that users spend more time and money on them.

Monitor Master is the world's leading User Experience Optimization platform, in use in over 60 mobile operators and equipment manufacturers worldwide. Device Master automatically creates detailed handset profiles so that all device data is held in a central knowledge base.

Argogroup is backed by Apax Partners Funds and 3i. Its headquarters are near Guildford, UK, with offices in Stuttgart, Portland, Pleasanton, Charlotte and Beijing, Paris, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Stockholm and Milan. For more information, visit: http://www.argogroup.com/ or read the Press Release online.