DoCoMo announced today that from September 6, 2003 the service area for DoCoMo’s FOMA(R) third-generation (3G) mobile phones will cover 99% of the population in the Kanto-Koshinetsu region. Its eight regional subsidiaries will also expand the FOMA service area to 96% of the population nationwide by the end of September.
China, the world’s largest market for cell phones, is aggressively developing a homegrown technology that can run the next generation of mobile telephone networks, challenging the traditional dominance of American and European companies. During the 1990s, as China spent $10 billion to build a national mobile telephone network, foreign companies reaped most of the rewards. Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia produced much of the equipment that runs the networks and many of the phones on them.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd has developed an antenna for wireless LAN (local area network) hot spots that can handle all three of the existing wireless networking standards. Wireless LAN hot spots are public places where users of notebook computers can access the Internet if their computers are equipped with wireless capabilities. As of the end of May, there were about 2,000 such hot spots in service in Japan.
“Wireless fidelity” is allowing an ever-increasing number of laptops and personal digital assistants (PDA) to log on to the Internet with broadband speeds — cable-free — in airports, VIP lounges, planes and hotels worldwide. The momentum for Wi-Fi is beginning to reach a critical mass in the travel industry with corporate travelers leading the way.
IP Talk, a subsidiary of electronics firm Mitsubishi Electric, will sell a phone that works on voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) only. It will operate only when in the hotspot of a Wi-Fi (802.11b) access point, according to Nikkei Electronics Asia Online.
Japan’s cell phone giant NTT DoCoMo said Wednesday it will conduct a field experimentof a fourth-generation wireless communications system that can relay…
