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Carriers

First Content for Vodafone live! CAST

Vodafone K.K. today announced the launch of content for Vodafone live! CAST, an automatic content delivery service scheduled to begin with the mid-March 2006 roll out of two new compatible 3G handsets, the Vodafone 904T by Toshiba and the Vodafone 804N by NEC. The visual mobile magazine “yubio” will debut as the first available content offering. “AkibaRun!” and “chu*rara” are scheduled to follow later in March. Yubio (based on a play on words using the Japanese word for thumb, which is oya-yubi) is a visual mobile magazine that readers can quickly flick through with their thumbs and targeted at males from 25 to 35 years of age. Yubio aims to be a visually oriented all-round entertainment magazine with set themes for each day of the week. Each issue, delivered daily, will have approximately 15 pages. (More details after the jump.)

DoCoMo Achieves 4G Field Trial

NTT DoCoMo, Inc. announced today that it achieved 2.5Gbps packet transmission in the downlink while moving at 20km/h. The fourth-generation (4G) radio access field experiment took place in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture on December 14, 2005. DoCoMo achieved a maximum 1Gbps speed in a similar field experiment on May 9, 2005. This time, by increasing the number of MIMO*1 transmission antennas from four to six and by using 64-QAM*2, data volume per transmission was increased from four bits to six bits. As a result, DoCoMo achieved a maximum speed of 2.5Gbps, which is faster than the International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R)’s proposed standard.

EZ FeliCa Announces New Campaign

KDDI have just announced [in Japanese] a new service that combines their Osaifu Keitai (wallet phone) service with the popular EZ-Navi GPS function. Users will be able to browse their mobile phone for locations that accept EZ FeliCa transactions and then request map directions to guide them there. The Ready Go! campaign will promote use of this system between March 1st and April 30th, with prizes including “Beauty” trips to Korea, onsen (spa) vacations and Edy e-cash certificates. The company offers five fully enabled handset models and this announcement reinforces our main points in this recent article about KDDI/au’s competitive edge in Japan.

Real Networks & DoCoMo Sign MOU

NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and RealNetworks, announced today that they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on February 15 as a first step to jointly deploying RealNetworks’ Mobile Streaming Server software to facilitate new video streaming capabilities that DoCoMo will add to its existing V-Live service(tm). The enhanced V-Live service would create an open environment to enable content providers (CPs) to use their own multi-format, cross-platform Helix Mobile servers, to stream video content over the Internet to FOMA handsets.

KDDI Testing WiMax Network

KDDI just announced the results from their recent WiMAX trials held in central Osaka. The company has conducted the experiment to evaluate the performance of this system, in accordance with IEEE802.16e, and confirmed that practical use in an urban environment was possible. KDDI has charted the performance of this IP base “Ultra 3G” system as a wireless method to supplement exisiting 3G service with base station to radius coverage suitable for large city scale services.