By this they are generally referring to GPRS, rather than 3G, of which more later. It has been shown repeatedly that introducing new technologies takes a lot longer than first thought. Local area networking took almost 15 years to really reach the mass market. This 15 year figure has been true of many new technologies in recent history. Even then there were at most 200 million users from a world population of over 5 billion potential users.
Slow introduction is nothing new.
Nothing to panic over. There were two key groups who had expectations. The businessmen and investors looked at the growing internet e-commerce activity and they looked at the number of mobile phones in use and the growth of that business and put two and two together and somehow came out with an answer in the billions. So, it was speculated, if you can have 1 billion phones in three years time and they are all internet enabled then you can have 1 billion people doing m-Commerce with their phones. Even without transaction charges, you could probably charge 20 dollars a month as a subscription.