Japan and China are planning a joint experiment on a new generation of Internet-capable mobile phones for high-speed data transmissions between the two countries, telecommunications officials said Sunday. The three-year project, aimed at promoting better Asian information technology systems, will begin next month and use Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), the officials said.
Prepare for some grim reading. There wasn’t a lot of good news on Vodafone’s Eastern Front, for the short term at least, arising out of Vodafone K.K.’s November 18-announced first-half financials. It is eerily quiet in the Little V machine gun nests out here on the 3G frontier. Vodafone K.K. faces gently sliding ARPU, wilting subscriber uptake and a long haul launch for a fully-fledged rollout of cutting-edge 3G keitai. “Japan Telecom Holdings (JTH) stock finished down 15 percent for the day after posting first half earnings,” notes CSFB senior telecoms analyst Mark Berman. “The market is essentially saying that it has completely lost confidence in both the competitiveness of Vodafone in Japan, and believes further that the current … management is more concerned with appeasing parent Vodafone than it is with rewarding minority shareholders,” he writes this week. On the other hand, the basis for a big comeback could be on the cards for next summer. We’ll give an overview of these points below, but before we start blazing away. ** We’d like to sincerely apologize to Vodafone K.K. for our mucking up an item in the Happy Packet discount series in last week’s newsletter. For the record, packet rate slashes DO apply to 3G, and we said they didn’t ** Honto-ni, gomen nasai, Vodafone-Sama! WWJ subscribers log-on and in..
Japan’s Telecommunications Carriers Association (TCA) announced that Japan’s mobile phone users amounted to 83.91 million as of the end of October. KDDI took more than half of the share, 52.6%, for the single month for the first time, thanks to the successful promotion of 3G service. October’s net increases saw KDDI back at the top position with 185,900 units, followed by NTT DoCoMo (146,000 units) and J-Phone (33,200 units).
Japan Telecom Holdings owned two-thirds by Britain’s Vodafone Group said on Tuesday that half-year operating profit fell 12 percent due to the hefty cost of building up its 3G network. Its wireless unit, Vodafone KK, known as J-Phone until September, scrambled to expand the area coverage of its high-speed 3G network this year in a bid to catch up with NTT DoCoMo Inc. and KDDI Corp.
In September, a group of IT professionals visited Japan to roll up their sleeves and find out who are pushing what enterprise applications here. With FeliCa debuting in trial form a few weeks from now, we were interested in hearing their views about Japan’s ready-built business apps. infrastructure. You may be surprised by their findings. Independent consultant (and WWJ subscriber) Donal O’Shea was part of the group that included representatives of a major French airline, an Australian steel company and a UK-based package delivery company, together with Douglas Neal and Piet Opperman of CSC Research Services and Sebastien Bacholet of Cigref. They met with Qualcomm, HP, IBM, NTT DoCoMo, Alcatel/Fujitsu, Telecom France, Nissan, and Hitachi, and toured the Yokohama Reasearch Park. Wow, Big Big Itinerary… In a nutshell, concludes O’Shea, “carriers have never understood the enterprise…”
Vodafone K.K. announced today that from December 1 it will offer “Vodafone Happy Packet”, a new discount service for packet data communications that makes Vodafone live! for PDC (2.5G) customers even easier to use with savings of up to 80%. Two types of Vodafone Happy Packet discounts will be available—Super (fixed monthly charge of 2,950 yen and 80% off) and Regular (fixed monthly charge of 1,200 yen and approximately 66% off). In addition, all of the fixed monthly charge can be used as a free charge allowance towards packet communications like Super Mail, web browsing, and Sky Mail (SMS) and voice communications as well. At a later date, Vodafone K.K. plans to separately announce details on a packet data communications discount for its Vodafone Global Standard 3G service.
Mediastick Inc started a new service called “Let’s do MEDIASTICK” for mobile phone users on November 1. The service requires specific hardware and software to read the barcodes, but cell phones that are equipped with decoder software, called “QR Code Decoder,” such as NTT DoCoMo’s F505i, SH505i and D505iS series, also support Mediastick’s system. All types of the 505iS series to be released from November can read the barcodes for the service.
Market leading NTT DoCoMo’s consolidated financial results for the six months ending Sept. 30th were announced last week at this press conference in Tokyo. Operating revenues were up 6.4% while operating income was down 7.8% with earnings per share 3.9% lower when compared to the same period last year. Dr. Kenji Tachikawa, President and CEO stated “During the first six months of fiscal year ending March 31, 2004, the Japanese cellular phone market posted robust growth with the number of net additional subscribers reaching 2.94 million. The enviroment surrounding our business, however, became harsher as the competition among mobile telecom companies intensified..” He also had some interesting comments about their strategy going forward to year end. Full Program Run-time 14:57
JCB Co., Ltd. has announced a biometric authentication trial project in a mobile environment. The trial starts November in Japan with JCB testing the usefulness of fingerprint authentication for mobile access to JCB’s on-line cardmember account inquiry service ‘MyJCB’, using NTT DoCoMo’s F505i mobile phone equipped with a fingerprint scanner. In this trial, the participants download the JCB Safety Login i-appli application, developed in cooperation with Fujitsu Ltd., to the F505i mobile phone to verify fingerprints information.
Japanese telecoms operators are likely to post strong half-year earnings, powered by the steady growth of 3G services and brisk demand for photo and video messaging and ring tone downloading. The new services have helped wireless carriers, including NTT DoCoMo Inc. and KDDI Corp. reel in fresh subscribers and maintain healthy per-user revenues, the industry’s main measure of profitability.
