Over the next 12 months, Vodafone and its rivals will have their work cut out to try and convince customers that they need to upgrade their mobile phones to 3G handsets.
It's a tough task, because there does not seem to be a great deal of evidence to demonstrate that consumers have much enthusiasm for 3G's supposed "killer applications", such as football videos and person-to-person video calling.
Not surprisingly, then, Vodafone has taken the easy route first, developing a product that it hopes will claw back some of the £13bn invested in 3G networks across Europe.
The Mobile Connect 3G/GPRS data card for laptops was launched to both consumers and businesses on Friday (it is available with a secure VPN - or virtual private network - often used by businesses to give their workers remote access).
The card, which fits in a laptop's PCMCIA slot, is essentially a version of the company's existing Mobile Connect GPRS card, but with go-faster stripes. Instead of accessing the web at GPRS speeds of around 50kbps, Vodafone promises that the 3G card can download data at up to 384kbps.
"The shift from 2G to 3G is like that from dial-up to broadband", Vodafone's new UK CEO, Bill Morrow, told a press conference on Friday.
The company's demonstration certainly looked impressive, with good quality video streamed on a PC via 3G at around 300kbps.
Users will apparently be able to listen to an internet radio station, while accessing web pages and video conference calls via a webcam also becomes a possibility. The company also claims that a file as large as 10MB could be transferred to a PC in less than 10 minutes.
Vodafone has even sweetened the pill by delivering tariffs which, while not exactly bargain basement, are certainly competitive. Providing that users sign up on the company's medium tariff by October, they can download up to 50MB of data a month for a fee of £20.
For many users, that should be more than enough to cater for speedy website access, email and reasonable-sized file downloads. Heavy users pay £85 for one gigabyte of data on the so-called power tariff.
The price for additional data ranges from 50p to £2 per megabyte, depending on the package. The card itself costs between £50 and £80, depending on which tariff the user chooses.
Bearing in mind that BT charges £85 a month for unlimited access to its Wi-Fi service OpenZone - a service limited by the fact that users have to find a hotspot each time they go online - Vodafone's 3G deals seem reasonably good.
Another plus, especially for business travellers, is that users will be able to roam with their laptops in other European countries while still downloading data at 3G speeds. Vodafone has announced that the 3G card will be compatible with eight European countries, including France, Germany, Ireland and Spain, by the end of May.
In theory, at least, upgrading to 3G should be a no-brainer for many mobile workers. Yet, for the short-term, there are likely to be issues with the 3G network.
Vodafone's 3G coverage is nowhere near nationwide. It claims to have 30% of the UK population within its reach, including those living in major cities such as London, Manchester, Cardiff and Birmingham, as well as the M4 corridor from London to Newbury, which is - coincidentally - Vodafone's HQ. O
n Friday, the company promised that around 60% of the UK population would have access to its 3G services by the autumn.
However, given other providers' problems with perfecting GPRS, let alone 3G networks, it will be a minor miracle if Vodafone's 3G network is as robust as the company claims.
A key issue could be what happens when a person moves from a 3G area to a GPRS one. Apparently, the card automatically diverts to GPRS yet maintains the connection - essential if the user is in the middle of a download. However, given the difficulties Three has had with its GPRS to 3G handshake, it remains to be seen whether this will work in practice.
There is also the question of the number of users on the network. At the demo, held at the Savoy hotel in London, it was easy to display streaming at speeds of 384kbps because no one else was using the 3G network.
However, when that bandwidth starts to be shared among many users, speeds could slow significantly. Vodafone, however, has promised that it will not dip below 200kbps.
Another issue is the upload speed of the card. While the download speed is impressive, uploads are a much slower 64kbps - around half the speed of broadband. Vodafone executives have murmured promises about ramping this up to 128kbps soon but, for early adopters, actually sending large files will still take a considerable amount of time.
Finally, there is the impact that the 3G card has on the battery life of a laptop. Vodafone claims that it is analogous to using a Wi-Fi card - and, as anyone who has ever used one will know, Wi-Fi cards are notorious sappers of battery life.
Someone with an older PC and limited battery life might find that the mobility Vodafone promises is a myth, because their screen will go blank after less than an hour of surfing.
So am I prepared to ditch the Wi-Fi card in favour of the 3G Mobile Connect card? Well, yes and no. Ultimately, the win-win scenario would be to have both options available and pay for them on the same bill from the same company. You guessed it - Vodafone, which works with BT on its Openzone hot spots, will launch a joint Wi-Fi/3G card, along with a combined tariff, later in the year.
Vodafone has also promised that, unlike the Three network, owners of its 3G handsets, which are due for release in the early summer, will be able to use their phones as modems to enable web surfing at 3G speeds on laptops, presumably with a similar tariff.
It will also be interesting to see how the other networks respond. Three could certainly threaten Vodafone, because its 3G network is more widespread than that of its rival. As a company that prides itself on its data traffic, O2 will almost certainly be thinking about launching a similar product.
If it works as billed, though, the Vodafone 3G Mobile Connect card should be a must for anyone with a laptop who spends more than a couple of days a month out of the office. I can't wait to get my hands on one.
