Deutsche Telekom (DT) has reported a quarter-on-quarter jump of 61% in levels of 3G mobile data traffic for the final three months of 2007, driven by applications from search partners and new multimedia devices. Although the parent company announced a slight 1.9% slip in Q4 profit to €808 million, its subsidiary T-Mobile demonstrated industry growth. DT CEO Rene Obermann said the use of mobile data was poised to rise further this year as T-Mobile begins selling the first of several phones designed with Google in the Open Handset Alliance. T-Mobile also plans, by the end of March, to start selling phones that include a customised mobile search software engine from Yahoo! called oneSearch. “The international mobile communications business is the company’s growth engine,” said Obermann. The company reported 119.6 million mobile customers across all its operations at the end of 2007, with 90.9 million based in Europe.

According to analysts, the increase in data is further evidence that mobile operators in Europe are expanding their businesses into digital data from simple voice services. “Basically, these numbers show that the increase in wireless data is finally starting to happen for the industry,” Emma Mohr-McClune, analyst at Current Analysis, told the International Herald Tribune. “We have seen small upticks in the past but nothing of this magnitude, which shows the trend is real.”