The comments followed the end Friday of the ITU's World Radio Communications Conference 2000, four weeks of talks in Istanbul.

The commission said 3,000 delegates from 190 countries negotiated several hundreds of highly technical proposals leading to the signature of agreements.

The ITU members agreed on a series of measures, notably new frequencies to ensure that future mobile telephones around the world can communicate with each other to exchange data, including through the Internet.

The decision sets the standard for global development of the 3G mobile telephones.

For the EU, the key results are additional 3G mobile spectrum, creating a stable environment for industry to invest and for member states to go ahead and licence operators, and sufficient spectrum for the Galileo project to go ahead, alongside but independent from the United States' Global Positioning System and the Russian Global Navigation Satellite System, the commission said.

The EU's planned Galileo satellite navigation system will be launched later this decade, it said.

"The results of the WRC-2000 largely respond to community policy objectives, such as in the areas of communications and transport," said information technology and telecommunications commissioner Erkki Liikanen.

"Now that sufficient availability of radio spectrum is secured, the community should go ahead and consolidate its position with regards to establishment of global wireless infrastructures in these community policy areas," he said in a statement.

Other agreements cover satellite broadcasting, "Internet-in-the-sky" services, and for the introduction of multimedia local loop by terrestial or satellite wireless infrastructure, it said.