NEC Corp. and its partner Ubiquisys Ltd. have won a key battle today with the announcement of a femto contract from Japan’s Softbank Mobile. According to Unstrung, Softbank plans to launch commercial services with the 3G home base stations in January next year, which is the first commercial launch date that an operator has set for 3G femtos anywhere and is well ahead of the industry expectations that femto services will launch in the 2010 time-range.
According to this post via the Malaysian National News Agency, TM International landed NTT DoCoMo as a shareholder in TM International (Bangladesh) Ltd (TMIB). In a statement issued Friday, TMI said DoCoMo has completed its purchase of a 30 percent stake in TMIB, TMI’s mobile operations in Bangladesh by acquiring all the issued and paid-up shares of TMIB previously held by A.K. Khan & Co Ltd and its four group companies. TMIB, trading under the brand name Aktel, operates a cellular Global System for Mobile Communications service in Bangladesh.
DoCoMo has announced that it invested 10 million U.S. dollars to acquire an 11.5 percent stake in Blue Ocean Wireless (BOW), an Irish company providing GSM communication systems to the merchant maritime sector. The acquisition is the latest joint endeavor with its affiliate Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT), including PLDT’s wholly owned mobile subsidiary Smart Communications, Inc. (SMART), one of BOW’s shareholders. As part of the arrangement, DoCoMo intends to assist BOW’s management in adding value to its services for global maritime carriers.
NTT DoCoMo said Wednesday that it will refund up to 32.25 million yen (approx. $300K usd) that it overcharged for its international roaming services in Germany and Cyprus. The top Japanese mobile carrier wrongly charged 100 yen for up to 100 data communication packets in Germany, instead of 50 yen for up to 50 packets, as specified in fee agreements formulated in March 2006. DoCoMo will deduct the excess charges from bills for September, as long as it can confirm the amounts from detailed records of customer communications.
DoCoMo has announced that it will stop accepting applications for its 2G ‘Mova’ mobile service as of November 30. Without stating when it would turn-out the lights on their legacy PDC network it would seem possible that it will happen by Q4 of fiscal 2008, therefore March 31 2009. It’s the end of an era!
NTT DoCoMo released it’s first quarter earnings for this fiscal year showing a mixed bag of results. While the YoY net income is up from $1.2B to a healthy $1.7B, attributed in part to cost cutting on handset subsidies, the blended ARPU indicates a continued downward trend due to increased competition. Full details [.PDF in English] are available Here.
