martinlittle.com:thinkThin

Carphone Warehouse is reporting a huge upsurge in its sales of 3G mobile handsets from 3, increased five-fold in the last two weeks.

The news follows drastic price cuts made by Hutchison to its voice tariffs at the beginning of the month in a move, which analysts said amounted to a 50% discount on the average per-minute charge for mobile calls compare to other rivals.

Over a thousand 3 handsets are now reported to be sold each day by the Carphone Warhouse. Last week, in an attempt to stimulate the market further, new 3 UK co-chief executive Bob Fuller attacked his rivals for sitting on the fence, and urged them to stop dragging their feet.

It looks like many others are thinking like me and taking the plunge. Assuming other other high street retailers are also seeing significantly increased sales of Three phones, then this must be a huge confidence, financial and publicity boost for Three. Once online sales are included, where it has been possible to pick up better deals on the handsets for a few weeks compared to the high street, it looks like we are seeing some real momentum gathering.

There have been murmurings that this incremental approach has been part of the Three gameplan all along. Initially, keep the cost high to limit the number of subscribers, so that if and when the network falls over, fewer people are upset about it. Now that those teething troubles have been ironed out, it's time to lower the barrier of entry and start building numbers.

Offering tariffs to challenge the established 2G networks is an easy way to get some market share, publicity and most importantly some cash rolling in. Given that Three have a brand new shiny network awaiting, with a stack of capacity, they can afford to take this approach of enticing users in for basic voice calling, before warming them up to parting with cold cash for content and making video calls. A further neat touch on the inclusive minute tariffs is that they are 'anytime minutes' - so no concept of peak and off-peak, until you run out of minutes, and no 'network unavailable' tones as everyone starts dialling the second peak becomes off-peak.

Of course, these may all just be signs of a desparate company trying to salvage something from an otherwise damp start. Hopefully these latest figures will give some confidence to Three and gee up the market.