Customer demand for SMS premium services and mobile Internet (WAP) was strong. In total, mmO2 carried 1.768 billion text messages during the quarter - up 6% - and achieved around 650 million WAP page impressions.

In the UK, O2 has so far handled 6.6 million text messages from fans of Big Brother 3 - a fly-on-the-wall television programme - split equally between text votes and requests for news, alerts, quizzes, games and ring-tones. The night of Adele's eviction from the Big Brother 'house' drew just under a million text votes - a third of all votes cast. At the same time, O2 also has recorded 4.2 million mobile web and more than seven million WAP page impressions to the Big Brother 3 online sites.

Peter Erskine, chief executive officer, mmO2, said: "Mobile data is a reality today. The key point is that for the first time, content, devices and ease of use are coming together and have contributed to a strong quarter. The momentum will continue throughout the year with the introduction of multimedia messaging and camera phones as well as interactive services based on the start of the new football season and other large crowd pulling events.

"We aim to increase revenue generated from mobile data to 16% by the end of this financial year. Data is essential to mobile industry growth and from the middle of this decade it is expected to account for more than 90% of the total mobile revenue growth."

Medium-speed mobile data networks (GPRS)
mmO2 has continued to grow 'active' GPRS connections by around 10,000 per month, driven largely by business users, and the total number now stands at more than 70,000. The Autumn launch of multimedia messaging (MMS) and Java-based services is expected to significantly increase consumer use.

xda from O2
The xda from O2, which for the first time combines a GPRS voice and data phone, a colour PDA and pocket PC, addresses both the traditional PDA and emerging pocket PC market. More than 4,000 sales of the new xda from O2 have already been recorded by mmO2 since its recent debut in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, with the device due to go on sale in Ireland shortly. In addition, the company has established reseller deals in the Asia Pacific market with leading telecoms providers, CSL in Hong Kong and StarHub in Singapore.

BlackBerry
In the business market, mmO2 maintained a leading position in enabling businesses to connect to their office email systems. It has now signed up more than 420 corporate customers for the BlackBerryTM mobile email solution and has sold over 8,000 devices.

Messaging
The growth in data service revenues was driven by higher SMS usage, including an increasing number of premium SMS services. In Germany, for example, data as a proportion of service revenue jumped to 18.3% from 14.5% in the previous quarter. Approximately 1.5% of this was accounted for by inbound SMS termination revenue, which had not previously been recorded as data revenue. However, on a like-for-like basis data's share of O2 Germany's total service revenues increased by more than two percentage points, due to special offers associated with the World Cup, and the introduction of other new data services.

mmO2 is also close to concluding negotiations with Nokia as its preferred technology partner for MMS. In the autumn, mmO2 will launch a number of MMS solutions aimed at consumers and businesses based on simple pay-as-you-go tariffs as well as bundled packages.