Kyocera Communications, a sales, marketing and service organization for Kyocera and Sanyo-branded products in the Americas, presented their technology portfolio of four broadband wireless devices at the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas. Along with its full line of mobile phones, the company showed a prototype all-in-one LTE base station along with three iBurst terminal devices in its booth at this years event.
Kyocera Corporation announced the commercial introduction of iBurst wireless broadband services in the Republic of Kenya, starting February 2, 2006. iBurst base stations and terminals designed and produced by Kyocera will be provided to Africa Online, the Kenyan Internet service provider (ISP). Africa Online will commence iBurst wireless broadband services in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, with plans to expand service into Mombassa, Nakuru, Kisumu, and Nanyuki. The company is targeting 20,000 subscribers within one year.
Kyocera has obtained a permit from the government to begin experiments of the “iBurst System,” ArrayComm’s wireless technology with maximum downstread of 1Mbps, and has begun testing the technology inside of their Yokohama office. The system is said to have a data receiving capability of a maximum of 1Mbps. Based on the TDD standard, a service using iBurst began in March of this year in Australia. The companies offer base station access via PC cards to clients on a monthly flat-rate data service package.
Personal Broadband Australia (PBA) announced that its eagerly anticipated iBurst 1 Megabit per second wireless service has been officially launched. PBA’s iBurst service is Australia’s first mobile broadband network. Invited guests attended the launch and included representatives from shareholding companies ArrayComm Inc, Mitsubishi Corporation Japan, Kyocera Corporation Japan and Mitsubishi Australia. See recent WWJ video interview with Dr. Martin Cooper about this project.
We’re finally back, and fully recovered, from the the annual CTIA Wireless event held last month in Las Vegas. As you might imagine living large on the strip for almost a whole week took a certain degree of – ahem – stamina, but we did manage to spend some valuable time the show floor, had several meetings in the VIP lounge, some interviews in the media room and a few ‘interesting’ connections in Caesars Palace.
While it’s only be fair to expect, considering the current economic times, that YoY attendance would be down as was the case during Mobile World Congress in February. That being said, the trade exhibitors – and delegates in general – seemed plenty up-beat with both Samsung and LG front and center in full force with along with all the usual suspects taking hefty square footage at LVCC. Of course there were a few Japanese players represented with DoCoMo, Fujitsu and Kyocera, who had an entire section of Sanyo handsets, both taking space to demo their products and services.
Internet firm Livedoor Co. said today it plans to apply for a new mobile licence that the Japanese government is expected to issue later this year, with the aim of starting a data service. Livedoor will apply for the licence on the 2 gigahertz band, a company spokesman said. It will be competing against mobile broadband startup IP Mobile Inc. and Willcom Inc., a wireless service operator owned by Kyocera Corp. and U.S. fund Carlyle Group.
In 1973 Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first portable handset, was the first person to make a call on a cell phone (from Motorola to arch-rival Bell.) Now he’s Chairman of ArrayComm, which has developed its iBurst Personal Broadband System based on adaptive array antenna technology. According to the company, iBurst allows mega-bit-per-second cellular bandwidth with much better efficiency than anything extant 3G systems can provide. In today’s exclusive WWJ interview, Cooper argues that 4G is already here; launches broadsides at carriers, engineers, and handset makers who have yet to fulfill the promise of wireless phones; and charges that, after “years of hype,” the industry has failed to deliver on 3G. He also relates his vision for the mobile space: “The Internet will engender thousands of different [mobile] applications.” This interview is a WWJ Classic. Full Program Run-time 17:38
