Counterattack! Price War! Kyodo News here (notorious for its story twisting) has reported that DoCoMo is planning a flat rate service for 3G FOMA at JPY 3,900 a good 300 yen lower than KDDI’s.If it’s true, it’s awesome news for the consumer and cloudy skies for 3G internationally. We are not sure when the flat rates will start, but it must be only a matter of time before Vodafone K.K. responds.
Talks getting cheaper (but not flat rate…yet) with DoCoMo announcing that it is going tocut interconnection fees between its PDCand 3G FOMA services and other carriers.Great! Go here for details.
Hate to say we told you so – but we did – in the ‘Japan Wireless 2004 Preview’ WWJ video interview with IDC’s Mitch Kimura. Shipments by Japanese mobile phone makers in January dropped 22.3% from a year earlier to 2.98 million phones and were also well down on December’s 4.71 million units, the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association said in a monthly report yesterday.
Last Friday’s monthly report released by the Telecommunications Carriers Association contained more grief for NTT DoCoMo’s 3G planners: While the carrier’s FOMA subscriber base grew by a healthy 15% in February, bolstered no doubt by the 900i-series handsets, KDDI yet again handily beat DoCoMo. While we aren’t reviewing our measure of confidence in the 900i-series, even after Big D admitted that the “best 3G phones in the world” were suffering from software bugs and had to recall nearly 70,000 Fujitsu handsets, we do note that NTT DoCoMo in Kyushu ‘fessed up last Friday to padding its subs figures so as to avoid the distinction of being the first DoCoMo sales region to actually suffer a (Gasp! Grrr!) net decrease in subscribers, according to Kyodo.
In search of a chic cafe hidden in the neon alleys of a teeming Tokyo business district, Mr Hiroki Wai activated the global positioning system on his cellphone and punched in the cafe’s phone number. A satellite in the Earth’s orbit charted his progress on a full-colour street grid displayed on the screen of his cellphone. ‘Now turn left; now turn right, walk straight ahead…Hurray, you’re here!’ the voice chirped from his receiver.
At his regular press briefing yesterday, DoCoMo president Keichi Tachikawa said that DoCoMo’s ongoing battle with KDDI to make the best 3G mobile phones is a battle that sometimes KDDI wins and one that sometimes DoCoMo wins, but that strategically, in terms of new services, it’s a war that DoCoMo will win. As of February 2004 the handset battle pits KDDI’s W21H, A5405SA and A1402S against DoCoMo’s 900i series, with the latest, the Panasonic model out about now. Behind that, there’s a speed war, with DoCoMo hastening the rollout of HSDPA initially at 3.6Mbps then 14.4 Mbps vs. CDMA1X WIN’s best-effort 2.4 Mbps. The more important issue for Tachikawa, however, is which carrier will successfully develop a new era (or as he mentioned-about 8 times- a “paradigm shift”) of services over the next two years.
The Government is considering a relatively new standard known as TDD (time division duplex) as a technology that up to three new providers could use to operate high-speed, 3G networks. If licenses are granted, it would spell new competition for NTT DoCoMo Inc, KDDI Corp and Vodafone KK. So far, three companies including Japan’s largest broadband operator, Softbank Corp, have expressed interest in obtaining licenses to run TDD networks.
The model that many customers have been waiting for, NEC’s version of the 900i, are to go on sale on Feb. 22, NEC and DoCoMo said today. Meanwhile, DoCoMo has said it’s going to show FOMA off at the 3GSM World Congress 2004 in France next week with a direct link to Japan. Excitement is growing about the 900i series, with informal impressions collected by WWJ, plus hard evidence that we’ve heard from InfoPLANT indicating that NEC’s 900i could be a smash hit.
Nepro Japan published results of a survey of mobile phone users about services and functions. According to the survey, the most wanted function is a TV, as about 40% of the respondents pointed to it. In response to a question regarding “functions desirable for future mobile phones” (multiple answers allowed), “TV” (43%), “dictionaries” (35%) and “keys” (29%) were the top three. Functions such as “electronic wallet” (25%) and “TV phone” (24%) did not attract many supporters.
Mazda and Toyota today announced that they have reached a basic agreement on providing Mazda owners with G-BOOK, a Toyota-developed network information service. Mazda aims to introduce this service from 2005. Toyota began providing the G-BOOK service to Daihatsu Motor Co. Ltd. last August and has already announced similar agreements with Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. and Mitsubishi Motors Corporation.
