Vodafone Group Plc, the world’s largest mobile-phone company, said customers at its mobile-phone unit in Japan spent an average of 4.3 percent less in the first quarter on their monthly phone bills. Customers of Vodafone’s J-Phone Co. spent an average of 6,980 yen in the three months ended June 30, down from 7,290 yen a month in the same period a year earlier.
Sales of mobile phone handsets in Japan totaled 11.9 million units from January to March, up 33.7% from a year earlier for the second consecutive quarterly rise, Gartner Japan Ltd. said Wednesday. Handset sales rose due to a slight increase in new mobile phone subscriptions and brisk demand to replace existing handsets with high-end, camera-equipped models.
If any of you begin to note a slightly limey tone to future Viewpoints, it’s because the WWJ team has a new member, moi – Paul Kallender, as Tokyo correspondent. Take a look at my my bio. below and you will see that I am fully capable of deploying my creative weapons of article construction well within 45 minutes! I’ll be filing weekly with my take on the trends animating Japan’s mobile biz, as well as offering insight you can’t get from our competitors -most of whom either don’t live in Japan or are not actually independent journalists. I can’t follow in ex-editor-in-chief Daniel Scuka’s footsteps (partly because he’s in Germany and I’m in Japan), but I do hope you’ll bear with meas I attempt in my own way to “rip the faceplate” off Japan’s wireless industry. Given my Aikido background, I will be doing my best to at least throw some of the PR pap journalists have to rewrite into the digital dustbin of history. In short, come to WWJ for the stuff you can’t get elsewhere.
NTT DoCoMo and its eight regional subsidiaries announced today that they will release preconditions for indirect access connection to the DoCoMo network to inter-exchange operators who wish to link to the DoCoMo network. Information, including a consultation schedule, will be posted on the company’s Japanese language website from July 15, 2003. On June 17, 2003, a Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications (“MPHPT”) study group established to study the setting of charges announced the results of its investigation regarding the setting of charges for both relay connections and calls made from IP phones to cell phones. This was followed by a policy issued by the MPHPT on June 25, 2003, entitled “The policy concerning the setting of charges for calls to cell phones from fixed line phones”.
NTT DoCoMo and its eight regional subsidiaries announced today new measures to counter the growing number of spam mail being sent via the network. The initiatives, in which offenders will either have their DoCoMo services temporarily suspended or completely rescinded, are part of the company’s continuous efforts in the fight against spam. In the past, spam mail was mainly sent to i-mode handsets from personal computers via the internet. To prevent this, DoCoMo implemented various measures, asking users to restrict incoming e-mail by blocking or accepting mail only from designated sources (domains or e-mail addresses).
Police are warning women against perverts using digital camera-enabled mobile phones to secretly film them in the streets. “Because women cannot easily detect men filming them, I’m afraid that the number of victims will skyrocket,” one detective said Saturday.
