The KIT which was launched in conjunction with Cellnet and Match of the Day magazine will be available on sites such as Excite Daily Mail Soccernet Daily Express Sports Live Uploaded and eight Premiership clubs including Sheffield Wednesday Aston Villa West Ham Leicester City Wimbledon Middlesborough Leeds United and Newcastle United.

European Telecom will support this activity with an integrated on-line marketing campaign including sponsorship advertising promotions and public relations.

While traditional sales channels remain predominant we cannot afford to ignore the growing importance of the Internet in todays business environment said European Telecom business development director Peter Cox.

The Football Phone KIT was launched last October. It comprises a Philips Diga phone linked to Cellnets pre-pay service and gives users access to football scores and other Premier League news.

Murray (45) is accused of taking the phone from Lisa Ann Davies at the Lord Burleigh pub in Vauxhall Bridge Road Pimlico last November.

His solicitor told magistrates that he suffers from a split personality and that he strenuously denied the allegation. Murray was granted legal aid despite a clerks decision against this.

But One 2 One said the methodology used for the survey was significantly flawed and that results quoted for One 2 One were distorted by varying response times of customer services which the service was not intended to measure.

In addition the sample size was too small to be statistically significant compared with call volumes handled by the networks said One 2 One spokesperson Ian Volans.

Our latest results for the areas tested demonstrate differences between the four operators are much less than Oftel suggests.

According to the survey Orange had the lowest dropped call rates and the lowest number of calls with no service.

Averaged over all four rail routes the variation in call success rate from the best performing to the worst performing network was 16 per cent ranging from 73 per cent to 89 per cent

The Oftel snapshot survey of successfully connected calls made on the four mobile phone networks showed a wide variation in call success rates by Vodafone Cellnet Orange and One 2 One – at different locations. Call success rates ranged from 73 per cent to 89 per cent on the rail routes surveyed and from 91 per cent to 97 per cent on average over the city areas surveyed. However Oftel said the results must be treated with some caution.

Commenting on the survey David Edmonds Director General of Telecommunications said:

With the huge growth of the mobile phone market it is important that mobile phone customers get the best value for money. There needs to be clarity for the customer so that people can compare the quality of service between mobile networks in order to get the best deal for their needs. This is not possible now.

OFTEL says it has been working with leading consumer groups including the Consumers Association and the four mobile network companies to agree a method of comparing and publishing mobile quality of service information.

Cellnet spokesperson William Ostrom agreed that the networks should produce performance data but that the problem has been getting the four networks to agree common policies of common interest.

There have been rumblings about us doing this for the last year he said.

Said Edmonds:

The mobile operators should respond positively to our initiative and publish regular and wide ranging comparable data on quality of service either by each company using a common approach or through an independent third party carrying out the tests for them.

The survey carried out in December by independent consultants is a snapshot of performance in three areas – London Edinburgh and Cardiff – and on the rail routes between these cities.

The survey involved some 1500 calls on each network – some 6000 calls in total and gives indicative results for the locations covered on the days surveyed.

Oftel cautions that results should not be seen as recommended best buys. However they do show for the locations and days chosen that there was appreciable variation in the level of call success rates for the different mobile networks.

The survey was done by Freshfield Communications for OFTEL between December 15-22. Successful calls in the survey were those that both connected for a period of 90 seconds and disconnected following correct call clearing procedures.

There are four new commercials linking First to individual components of the loyalty package such as First for Families.

Cellnet says a million people have been connected to First since it launched seven months ago with 658000 people joining in the last quarter.

Cellnet First is the only package of its kind in the UK cellular industry. Its no exaggeration that First has revolutionised the mobile market exaggerated Cellnet marketing director Kent Thexton.

So says Lehman Brothers senior investment banker Jeremy Alun-Jones.

Alun-Jones also estimates the number of users in the European market is forecast to grow from 92 million to 215 million by the end of 2005.

This increase will bring a need for a further $58 billion in investments for the mobile market to be equal to fixed telecoms.

The phone offered is the MT-230 a modified MT-30 with pre-pay software. The Mitsubishi package is going out at a retail price of 69.99

Were delighted to be joining this important new area of our industry. The MT-30 has been a huge success and we hope it is equally popular among pre-pay customers said Mitsubishi national sales manager Richard Ward.

The new R&D facilities represent a major investment in Panasonics global GSM activity and a serious commitment in the short and long term to the industry said MCUK MD Masahiko Yamamoto.

The company called Talking Solutions uses software developed by a firm called Solnet capable of detailed analysis of telecoms bills.

Talking Solutions makes its money by charging 25 per cent of the money it saves.

We formed the company because networks arent billing companies correctly. said Barry.

We found one example where a company was over-charged 36000. The service provider was rounding calls up to minutes rather than billing by the second.

The chance of speaking exactly for a minute is very remote. To pick up a discrepancy of 0.1p is difficult.

This sort of over-charging is rife in the industry. Most service providers do this. They are not doing this intentionally. It happens when a corporate account is set up. There may be a thousand phones and every phone has to be set up individually. Along the way a company ends up with 1500 mobiles connected and a third are connected inaccurately.

SPs systems cant keep up with all the new changes and tariffs from the networks. Weve spoken to 28 companies and 27 of these have been billed inaccurately.

When I was account manager for British Gas at Martin Dawes I was in a meeting where two British Gas ex-employees had developed a program to analyse their bills. They found Vodafone Corporate were billing 15.1p for a national call instead of 14p. We teamed up with them and have sole distribution rights to market the software. Were using our expertise as account managers to go into large corporates and sell the product. If we cant save them money we dont charge them anything.

Use of our website is free to all members and in addition to full categorised listing in our directory pages offers direct links to our members own websites (www.fcs.org.uk) said trade association spokesperson Jaqui Brookes.