Willcom Inc., Japan’s largest personal handy-phone system (PHS) company, said Tuesday it will introduce a flat rate for voice communication starting 1 May, becoming the first domestic wireless carrier to provide such service. It said the service will allow users to call fellow Willcom PHS users for unlimited minutes for 2,900 yen per month. Willcom, formerly DDI Pocket Inc., was bought out from KDDI Corp. by the U.S. investment firm Carlyle Group.
Checking headlines around the Web yesterday and today, I was struck by the eerie silence on Tokyo’s mobile street. There is a ton of coverage on the Livedoor/Fuji TV take-over battle, but that’s largely a Web/media topic and not really related to mobile. Where’s all the silence coming from? And could it be related to Vodafone, Softbank or flat-rate mobile voice calling? To be sure, we’re not totally lacking mobile news; DoCoMo have posted a couple of releases in the past two weeks, including the 22 February announcement of Mobile FeliCa, see WWJ’s video coverage here and the 8 March notice on the launch of the N700i and P700i 3G FOMA handsets. Similarly, KDDI have some releases up (but only in Japanese; nothing in English since 8 February), notably on their new W31S music-player form-factor celly from Sony Ericsson.
KDDI have just announced that as of 7 April they will have a total of 36 channels available on the WIN platform’s “EZ Channel” video content service. New additions include pro baseball, language lessons and an extreme sports program, X Games, from Walt Disney Japan. Customers can start signing up next week to see introduction program previews and, we guess, finally buy into a flat-rate packet data plan (if they haven’t already).
Recently, East Japan Rail (JR East) and NTT DoCoMo held a press event in Tokyo to announce the January 2006 start of “Mobile Suica” which will allow i-mode phones to serve as train tickets. WWJ’s Gail Nakada filed her report here and today’s video program gives you a ring-side seat to learn how Big D and JR plan to win over the hearts, minds and wallets of millions of mobile-phone using commuters (and most of them are). As you’re watching today’s press conference, there are several key points to keep in mind. First, until now, it has in fact not been possible to use your phoneas a train ticket in Japan. Despite all the live demonstrations, trade show hypeand media speculation around FeliCa, the FeliCa-based Suica cards used by JR andthe FeliCa-based i-mode handsets sold by DoCoMo have been incompatible. Yes, you could use your FeliCa handsets to buy a ticket, but the phone itself was not the ticket.
LG Electronics announced they have successfully demonstrated 3.5G high-speed data transmission at CTIA Wireless 2005, taking place in New Orleans, March 14-16, using Lucent Technology’s 14-Mbps download-supportive W-CDMA system, as well as the company’s own HSDPA-enabled mobile phone. According to the company, the model is the same used in a successful test run at Nortel Lab on 6 March, the first of its kind in the world.
Sony Ericsson today announced a low cost, CDMA telematics module to support the pervasive growth of automotive and industrial applications like driver navigation, security, cargo tracking, mobility services and infotainment. The CM52 not only cuts costs for integrators of telematics solutions, but it is tri-mode to support multiple cellular technologies and boasts the widest network coverage in North America.
