The move is a success for the EDGE Operators Forum, which has been working behind the scenes with key vendors and operators to gain acceptance for the technology outside the North American market.

Leo Nikkari, director of 3G industry relations at AT&T Wireless and a prime mover behind the EOF, said the next step is to gain agreement on a common approach for interoperability and testing of both terminals and services. ''It is not good enough to have ''trust-me terminals,'''' he said.

''We''ll be driving for very rigorous specification requirements.''

Nikkari expects the first terminals will be available in Europe by the end of this year, although it would be the middle of next year before there are mass-volume shipments.

The EOF has been working in conjunction with the GSM Association and Global Mobile Suppliers Association on the initiative and last week held a meeting with 150 key vendors and operators on the fringes of the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes.

Following the meeting, both Ericsson and Nokia publicly stated their backing for EDGE in the 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum bands - a sharp departure from their positions 12 months ago, when the vendors were reluctant even to discuss the prospects for EDGE.

J.T. Bergqvist, senior vice president and general manager of IP Mobility Networks at Nokia, now believes that all GSM operators will automatically go to EDGE in their narrowband spectrum in 2003. ''All terminals will have EDGE capabilities, whether that is GPRS/EDGE or GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA,'' he said.

Speaking at the 3GSM World Congress, Torsten Hunte, strategic product manager, Datacom at Ericsson, said that all the major handset vendors had now agreed to deliver EDGE terminals by the middle of next year.

Apart from Nokia and Ericsson, Siemens has also committed to the initiative.

These three vendors are already supplying infrastructure to the North American market and will deliver the first 800/1900MHz EDGE terminals to AT&T, Cingular Wireless and Rogers Cantel by the middle of this year.

Nikkari said Alcatel was also ''dancing around'' the issue, and added: ''There will be some very interesting, and surprising, new terminal vendors in the EDGE market.''

Motorola, Nortel and Lucent are also expected to start developing EDGE infrastructure as part of their product portfolios. Graham Wright, senior marketing manager at Lucent, previously said the vendor could begin production by the end of the year.

So far, only North American operators are rolling out EDGE, including it as part of their migratory path toward WCDMA due to their own particular spectrum constraints.

Vendors say that elsewhere in the world, EDGE and WCDMA will be deployed as complementary technologies, with priority dependent on spectrum and regulatory issues. In many cases operators will implement EDGE as a capacity booster to GPRS - after WCDMA has been rolled out.

Ericsson believes EDGE is now a natural step in the GSM evolution chain and represents a low-risk investment for mobile operators wanting to deliver high-speed Internet.

''Operators who introduce both WCDMA and EDGE will quickly gain competitive advantage,'' stated the vendor. ''Like WCDMA, EDGE delivers contiguous wide area coverage, global service availability, additional capacity and improved quality of service.''

EDGE is capable of providing a bit rate of 48kbit/s per timeslot, meaning the maximum theoretical data rate is 384kbit/s. Ericsson concedes the typical user data rates for EDGE are likely to be 140-160kbit/s, compared with 40-50kbit/s for GPRS and 9.6kbit/s for GSM.

Ericsson adds that the EDGE-WCDMA combination also enables operators to have more control over network investment and make the best of scarce resources. ''Telecoms consultancy Northstream estimates that operators can save up to 50% on capital expenditure on a combined EDGE-WCDMA network compared with deploying WCDMA alone.''