Europe : Marco De Benedetti ( inset ), Chief Executive Officer of TIM and Massimo Castelli, Operational Director, informed the Budapest Convention of TIM's guidelines and the sales objective for the upcoming months.

With the six new UMTS handsets presented to over two thousand sales-network dealers at the convention, TIM's range of third generation terminals will now comprise nine models. Together with Edge handsets, the overall number of third-generation devices amounts to 16 models.

With 26.2 million lines (at 31 March 2005) in Italy, TIM reconfirmed itself as the leading operator in the Italian market and confirms its plans to develop UMTS, which envisage an accelerated coverage of the national territory with 11,000, UMTS sites scheduled by the end of 2007 and an 80% coverage of the population. The UMTS lines forecast on TIM's network by 2007 will be around 9.4 million. However, if Edge lines are also included, by the end of 2007, all third generation lines will amount to about 18.7 million. In addition, by the end of 2005 TIM will commence experimentation on HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), the super UMTS able to increase the network's transmission speed to over 10 Megabit per second, so that the fixed and wireless wideband will develop in tandem.

As concerns its commercial services, from June TIM customers will have the choice of new and exclusive UMTS models: Samsung Z500, the smallest and easiest to use UMTS handset on the market, the Samsung Z300, the Samsung SGH Z107, the Nokia 6680, the ONDA N5000 and the Benq S80.

The Samsung Z500, which is marketed in Italy exclusively by TIM, provides all the latest multimedia applications, such as the MP3 reader for downloading pieces of music, live television over the handset with TIM's Mobile TV, the management of electronic mail with the system Synchro Mail and obviously the classic videocall over the UMTS network. The Samsung Z300, instead, represents the cutting edge in musical entertainment over the cellphone, thanks to a MP3 reader with stereophonic sound, surround effects, an equaliser and a button dedicated to downloading music.

The new range of handsets comes with personalised menus for the immediate use of TIM services and a new look for the UMTS mobile portal to let customers navigate and use multimedia services with even greater ease.

TIM's UMTS product portfolio offer starts from a retail price of Euro 249 with a Euro 250 voice bonus plus Euro 300 of multimedia services offered for free as an incentive to try the new technology.
TIM's strategy for the development of UMTS services is to build up an authentic community of third-generation users, where customers can speak, navigate and make videocalls without charge up until the end of the year.

In addition, listening to digital music over handsets will be one of the leading third-generation services, especially for TIM: the i.Music Store offer, accessible through TIM's UMTS mobile portal, is in fact especially attractive. Customers will find over 350,000 musical pieces, images, ring tones and responderie (musical answers to calls) of artists in i.Music Store, organised by album and musical genre. The presentation of the artists will be synchronised with the most important releases of CD music.

At the Budapest Convention TIM also announced the revolutionary "One for All" offer that will- from 6 June  enable customers to send messages to all the cellphones of any operator and to speak, at 1 eurocent per minute with over 26 million TIM customers.
"One for All" goes beyond national borders to facilitate TIM customers abroad: it can also be used in roaming and not only lets customers make calls but also receive calls at 1 eurocent on all the networks of Free Move and on the networks of TIM's roaming partners in 37 countries, in Europe and in North and South America.
"One for All" is open to both existing and new TIM customers.
In addition, whoever takes advantage of TIM's great summer offer, while maintaining his or her own cellphone number, will receive a Euro 500 traffic bonus for telephone calls and messages.