3 aiming to boost dongle sales in dealer channel

3 said last week it is selling more than 1,000 USB modems per day and expects dongle sales to hit a million by the end of the year.

But 3 head of indirect sales Peter Butler said not enough dongle sales were coming from the dealer channel.

Butler said: “Carphone Warehouse was all over it like a cheap suit. The lack of movement in
the dealer channel will change. We’ll throw more money at it.”

Butler added the rollout of 3’s network share deal with T-Mobile will hit 7,500 cell sites by June, and 13,000 by the end of next year.

“It will be best in class,” he said. “We won’t have capacity problems.”

The deal is designed to provide better, cheaper penetration of high speed wireless broadband.