How videotelephony ate the budget
UMTS or 3G, the successor of the classic, slow GSM mobile network was the hype of the early 2000’s. It had nothing to do with consumers directly, as the UMTS spectrum had to be sold to telecom companies first, and only then the infrastructure would be built and services rolled out. The hype emerged from the fact that in the middle of the dot-com bubble over in the US, someone planted the seed of »videotelephony« as the next big thing in the heads of managers across all telecom companies in Europe.